Morons and Madmen
by acid rounds
Summary: Stranded in a remote fortress with a rogue mad scientist, no hope of backup, and a horde of monsters and traps waiting around every corner, Wesker and Leon reluctantly band together to take down their common target. Now the only question is whether they'll be able to complete their mission before they drive each other insane. Rated for violence, language.
1. Wesker is Thwarted by Co-op Puzzles

A/N: This fic was created mostly as an excuse to make Wesker and Leon act catty to each other. It takes place in some nebulous time period between Resident Evil 4 and 5. Any future canoodling will be fully consensual, but not necessarily romantic. Yes, there is an OC in here. Relax, he only exists to serve as an antagonist and be mocked.

This is for you, everyone who ships this weird rarepair! Yes, all three of you.

Note that this story is also being posted on Archive of our Own under the same name. This version will be slightly censored in later chapters in order to conform to site guidelines, so head over there if you want the full version.

 **Chapter One: In Which Wesker is Thwarted by Co-op Puzzles**

* * *

The dying screams of his men crackled over the earpiece, mixed with bursts of static and sharp commands to pull back, falling finally silent with a last crackle of interference. Wesker scowled in irritation. So much for his 'top men'; all that time wasted training and arming his handpicked favorites, and they hadn't even lasted 20 minutes. Good help was so hard to find these days. It seemed he would have to track Angelus down through this twisted fun house all by himself, without hope of backup. He missed Ada already.

Wesker had come to this castle in a remote corner of Europe on one of his rare errands for his current employer—one of them anyway—to put down a researcher that had developed the usual delusions of grandeur and gone rogue. Dr. Angelus Fitzpatrick, a minor genius who barely registered as a background blip on Wesker's radar before now, had made off with a substantial amount of company secrets before holing himself up in his personal fortress. Normally, Wesker would have turned down such a profitless mission, but Angelus also happened to have stolen a piece of research that was important to him.

He went to the nearest window and peered outside at the miles of desolate marsh which stretched out in every direction. Muddy water rippled around the island of firm ground on which the castle stood. The flooded causeway meant no ground access until the waters chose to recede again, which wouldn't have been a problem if Angelus hadn't invested so heavily in anti-aircraft artillery. Such a gem of a location the scientist had chosen for his den, Wesker thought with a sneer. And he had the nerve to call the place 'Arcadia'. Some paradise. The man had a fixation—but then, didn't they always?

Ages ago, some medieval idiot had gotten the bright idea of building a castle in a swamp. Who knew how many attempts had fallen over and sunk beneath the muck before they'd found a spot that worked. Like most buildings on unstable ground, the castle sank a few inches every year, and its successive owners had built on top of it to stay above waterline. The result was some truly dizzying architecture on a patchwork fortress of so many differing styles its seams were visible.

A distant moan shivered through the hall, drawing Wesker from his window-gazing. Angelus had not come here alone, though who these people had been and how they had gotten here, it was no longer possible to tell. One and all had been infected by a new variation of the tyrant virus long before Wesker arrived. So far they had posed him little trouble.

That was no reason to get sloppy. He had his gun at the ready as he made his way down the hall, alert for the lightest shuffle of a footstep in any nearby shadow. The air had cooled considerably now that the sun was down, and chill drafts swept through the halls along with the tormented moans of the infected.

A tile depressed under his foot with a faint click, and Wesker reacted on pure reflex, dashing forward moments before a column of spikes skewered the place he had just been standing. The castle was loaded with booby traps, some so devious and silent in their deployment that they caught even Wesker of guard. Recent additions to the castle, he suspected. Angelus had been planning this for much longer than any of them expected.

At the end of the hall, he came to a room whose sole purpose seemed to be the display of ornamental vases. A very large, very ornate gate barred access to the other exit, of the kind that screamed 'hello, I have a needlessly elaborate locking mechanism." Sure enough, the first step involved standing on a pressure plate, which opened a panel of the opposite wall, revealing a hidden crank. The crank, he assumed, would wind back the gate. Yet the wall shut itself back up if he left the pressure plate, and even his superhuman speed wasn't fast enough for him to reach the crank in time. The hidden alcove was just out of reach, almost as if its architect had known his top speed.

But perhaps he was getting too paranoid.

Frustrated, he seized the gate with his bare hands and wrenched at the bars. No matter how hard he pulled, he could bend it no further than a finger's width. This had clearly been designed with B.O.W.s in mind. Wesker folded his arms across his chest, leaned his back against the gate, and took a minute to glower. The rest of the room's furniture offered no help, the vases too lightweight and their pedestals too firmly secured to the floor. He would have to fetch something heavy.

As he doubled back through the drafty corridor, he was surprised by the racket of gunfire coming from the nearby assembly hall. So, someone was still alive after all. He followed the noise to the hall and slipped out onto the second-floor balcony.

"Your pets are looking pretty ragged, Angelus!" A slightly breathless male voice called from the ground floor. "Think you're not feeding them properly?" The man sounded so familiar, yet Wesker couldn't place a face to the voice. It wasn't any of his men.

"We'll see how mangy they are once they feast on your bones, government lapdog!" Angelus yelled back, his reedy voice as unmistakable as it was irritating. From Wesker's vantage point, he could just make out Angelus running up a staircase before a truly absurd number of spears blocked the path behind him, closing in a circular formation not unlike a lamprey mouth. Several deep, rumbling growls rose in concert down below him.

Wesker stepped forward and looked over the railing. Three B.O.W.s were converging on a lone gunman half their size, a fourth of their number lying motionless some feet away. Though Wesker had never encountered this particular B.O.W. in person, he recognized it from H.C.F.'s files. The SP-78, nicknamed 'Gougers', had been developed as upgraded Hunters. Each was twice the size of a man, and spliced together from a fusion of alligator, insect, and human DNA. They had the same defect many Tyrants did, where the epidermis couldn't cover the enlarged bones and musculature. Their mismatched arms ended in three bony claws, one long and two short. They liked to grasp prey by the head with their short claws and then use the long claw to puncture its skull, hence their nickname.

Angelus had twisted them further by adding malformed, skinless wings which braced against the floor in a bat-like posture, adding nothing to the creatures' combat potential. The B.O.W.s definitely couldn't fly with them. It took all of Wesker's professionalism to keep his eyes from rolling out of his head.

As for the unlucky prey caught between the three, Wesker recognized his face at once and could not contain his smirk. Well well, if it wasn't Ms. Wong's favorite pet. Leon Kennedy had seen better days. Splattered in blood and grime with his shirt ripped, he stood facing down the B.O.W.s with nothing but a pistol and a combat knife. Wesker planted his elbows on the railing and rested his chin on his hands, intent on watching the show.

The two in front shrieked forward, their grasping claws outstretched. Leon rolled to the side, neatly dodging both of them, and came up in time to fire two shells into the head of the third. The gunfire did not faze the Gouger, which screamed but kept on coming. This was the part where ordinary soldiers and survivors distinguished themselves. Wesker had seen it too often over the years: good men getting themselves cut down because they held their ground when they should have run, foolishly expecting a B.O.W. to go down when shot.

Leon had experience. He moved as soon as he finished firing, not waiting to see the impact of his bullets. It was a good call. The third Gouger would have smashed his head into the tile if he had been even a second slower.

As the battle went on, Wesker had to admit to himself that the agent had some skill. His shots were quick and precise, nailing vulnerable spots without fail. He ducked and weaved around the three agile B.O.W.s with practiced ease, occasionally resorting to fancy acrobatics to escape a strike. One Gouger went down, its abdomen ruptured, then a second fell after having too many holes blown through its torso. As he watched Leon shove his combat knife through the last Gouger at the juncture of spine and skull, Wesker began to understand just what Ada saw in this man.

Quiet descended, the final agonized shrieks fading into decaying echoes. Leon ripped his knife out and shook the blood off it, his face twisted with disgust. It occurred to Wesker that if one mechanism within the castle required two people to operate, there might be more. Leon would be more than heavy enough to hold down a pressure plate. He would also be useful in distracting and dispatching B.O.W.s. After all, this man was one of the rare survivors of Raccoon City. Surely he could last longer than half an hour.

"Not bad," Wesker called down.

Leon looked up from reloading with a start. He glanced around for a second before zeroing in on Wesker, and then his handsome face twisted in a sneer.

"Wesker," he spat, half curse, half question.

Wesker inclined his head in acknowledgment. He vaulted over the railing and landed gracefully on the bottom floor, weathering the impact without a flinch. Leon backed up a step and aimed his gun between Wesker's eyes, as if that peashooter could pose any real threat to him.

"So, you're the man who keeps sending all my best agents haywire," Wesker said. "You've caused quite a lot of trouble for me in the past."

"I do my best," Leon replied, eyebrows quirking upward. "What are you here for?"

"The same thing as you, I imagine. Angelus has become an unstable element, and I'm here to remove him." Wesker approached at a steady pace, his arms lax at his sides. It wouldn't do to appear too threatening. He was not eager to repeat the experience of digging bullets out of his face.

"Doing your own dirty work for a change? What, is no one willing to work for you anymore?"

"I have plenty of willing soldiers. The problem is quality. I'm afraid the team I brought has already gotten themselves wiped out." Wesker came to a stop a few feet in front of the agent, hands crossed behind his back. "And you? Do you actually have backup this time?"

Leon's silence was all the answer he needed. Wesker chuckled.

"Perhaps we can help each other."

"You're joking," Leon replied, flat as old champagne. He looked like he would rather eat raw sewage than comply, and Wesker found his mood brightening already.

"Normally it would be no trouble for me to squash an insect like Angelus. However, you may have noticed that some of the quirks of this building's architecture require more than one pair of hands to bypass."

"Yeah. I know what you mean," Leon admitted. "I was thinking of bringing along a friend who can't try to shoot me." He waved a hand at one of the dead B.O.W.s.

"If you're happy dragging that all the way around the castle, then I'll leave you to it," Wesker said, his lips quirking at the mental image.

Leon sighed, his jaw visibly clenched. He dared to take his eyes off Wesker for a moment, sizing up the nearest Gouger corpse. Wesker waited patiently as Leon came to terms with the obvious flaw in his plan.

"I don't want you anywhere near my back," Leon said at last. Almost as an afterthought, his gun dipped towards the ground.

"Don't you trust me, Leon?"

"Like a knife in the back," Leon muttered. "Angelus went that way," he said, pointing with the hilt of his combat knife at the spear barrier blocking off the stairs. "Looks like he cribbed some of his architecture from another rural castle I know."

Wesker examined the barrier and pounded it with a fist experimentally, making Leon jump. The metal did not even dent. Clearly that barrier wouldn't be bypassed until they found the proper keys. There were three suspicious indentations in the surrounding walls which looked like they needed to hold something.

"I see. Then it seems the only option is to continue heading towards the east wing. There's a gate in the way that will require both of us."

"I think I've seen that. On the second floor, right?" At Wesker's nod, Leon pointed to a door on their left. "This way leads to the other stairs."

"If you want to take the long way," Wesker said.

"You know a shortcut?"

Wesker held out his hand, lips twitching up at the corners. Leon looked at his hand, then back up to his eyes, uncomprehending. Wesker just waited for the penny to drop. When it did, Leon visibly recoiled.

"It's—not that far," he said.

"And you have to pass through the hall with the sawblades, if I remember right," Wesker said.

Leon glowered at Wesker's hand. If he chose to reject Wesker's 'shortcut,' it was no skin off his nose. This was only a small test to feel out how much his new partner could be persuaded to trust him.  
In fact, Leon surprised him when he set his jaw and came closer, not taking the hand but communicating his assent regardless. Chris would never have agreed, even if the alternative required swimming through a sewer infested with crocodiles. Pleased, Wesker wound an arm around Leon's waist and then lifted the man as if he weighed no more than a toddler. Leon inhaled sharply and seized the cloth of Wesker's shirt. His flesh felt cool under Wesker's fever-hot hand, even through the light barrier of clothing.

Once his grip was secure, Wesker leaped back up to the 2nd floor balcony as easily as he'd jumped down. Leon all but shoved himself out of Wesker's arms as soon as they landed on solid floor, stumbling in his haste. Wesker chuckled.

"This way, then." He opened the door and waved for Leon to proceed him. Leon didn't move. They stood staring at each other for a solid minute, Leon refusing to turn his back to the older man, Wesker testing his patience.

Finally, Leon sighed and said, "Let's just walk side by side."

Wesker smirked and took the lead, sending the very clear message that he did not consider Leon a threat. After a moment of hesitation, Leon's footsteps followed him. Despite having Wesker's exposed back right in front of him, the agent didn't try anything. Wesker was almost disappointed.

"I'll step on the plate. You can get the crank," Leon said once they'd reached the room with the gate.

"Fine," Wesker replied. Was Leon afraid he would step off the plate and let the wall close on his 'partner'? How cute.

The crank turned easily under his hands, the gate stuttering only a little when the bent bars tried to retract into the wall. The mechanism clicked to a halt, and the way was left clear. The room had no other tricks waiting for them.

"Shall we?" Wesker asked.

"After you," Leon said.

The newly exposed doors opened into a circular room with a few antique chairs and a large stone statue of a deer. A body was nailed to the wall behind the statue, dripping blood on blue carpet. Wesker glanced over the corpse for signs it might reanimate and summarily dismissed it. The statue's base had a brief poem inscribed in it, a half-gibberish verse about the sweet inevitability of death. Standard fare, really.

"It's like all these nutcases use the same shitty interior decorator," Leon muttered beside him.

There were a few carriers staggering around the dark corners, green ooze dripping from their exposed brain matter. It was an odd mutation with no practical applications whatsoever, though the processes behind its appearance intrigued Wesker nonetheless. It seemed that carriers infected by the T-Arcadia acquired 'Licker' traits very early. He'd have to check their tongues to be sure. They were somewhat faster than the garden variety zombie, and prone to leaping suddenly across rooms. They still weren't much of a threat, and between Leon and himself they had the area cleared without hassle.

One more long hall full of open windows, billowing curtains, and shuffling carriers later, they came to three doors and a staircase leading downwards.

"I'll check downstairs," Leon said. "You can stay up here."

"So anxious to part ways? Very well." Wesker reached into one of the pockets on his tactical vest and pulled out a spare earpiece. "If you require my assistance, you can contact me with this."

"Fine," Leon said, accepting the earpiece. "And likewise, I guess."

Leon replaced his own ear piece with Wesker's, then jogged down the staircase as quickly as he could without looking like he was outright running away. Wesker smirked once the agent was out of view.

This partnership promised to be entertaining, if nothing else.

* * *

End Note: So begins a horrible not-quite-friendship.


	2. Leon is Aggravated by Directions

**Chapter 2: In Which Leon is Aggravated by Directions**

* * *

Leon paused at the foot of the stairs, glared upwards, and second-guessed his life choices. Him, working with Wesker. Just thinking the sentence made him sick. Well, needs must, and biohazards made strange bedfellows.

A door clicked closed up above. Only then did Leon leave the stairs and head on his way down yet another drafty hall. He'd known this mission would suck the moment he'd seen the castle. To think that once upon a time, he didn't hate castles. Heck, as a kid, he'd been over the moon about getting the chance to tour one. That was before the incident in rural Spain, before Ramon Salazar and the plagas ruined castles for him forever. Spain had ruined a lot of things; pitchforks, farm communities, hedge-trimmers.

It didn't help that the décor here was so similar. Spacious, airy rooms with ceilings so high he felt like a child beneath them, rich blue carpets, suits of armor in neat lines poised and waiting with weapons drawn (if he was skittish around the armor, no one could blame him). Ever so often he paused to listen for the distant cackle of Salazar's laughter, only to be met with silence.

He opened one of the many doors lining the hall, finding yet another small room with nothing but two lurking infected which he put down. He hated these new zombies. The bastards jumped all over the place, evading his head shots, and, god, the noises they made: rattling breath, wet footsteps, pulsing and squishing from their twitching limbs. Every time he entered a room of them it sounded just like a horde of Regenerators, and Leon had a small heart attack.

Soon he came to an intersection guarded by a wolf statue. More bad poetry had been carved into its base, something about wings eating the sun. Leon shrugged it off and took the path on the right. It brought him past a stairway, which he ignored because going upstairs meant risking another Wesker encounter, down a winding little hall, and then into a trashed banquet hall. It alarmed him a little, how easily he fell into the old rhythm of exploration. Somewhere along the line, it had become his job to trespass alone into the forbidden and dangerous. For once he was supposed to have backup this mission, local help. They hadn't lasted long. It boiled his blood to think about it. More deaths to add to his nightmares, more comrades he'd failed. Old hat.

A nasal, accented voice in his ear broke through his musings. "Jump left," Wesker said.

Leon jumped alright, out of shock more than anything. A blur of dark green dropped from above and landed right where he had been standing. Yellow reptile eyes glared into his, filled his entire field of vision as he got way too close a look at the B.O.W.'s ugly face. It growled.

He dove backward just as the B.O.W. swiped at him. Maybe 'dove' was too graceful a word—it was more like stumbling with style, and he only just managed to keep from falling on his ass. Once he could see more than its head, he recognized that this was the same kind of monster he'd killed back n the assembly hall, the ones that looked like crossbreeds between a crocodile and a beetle. It kept coming after him, determined to turn his head into a morbid new bowling ball. He had objections to this which his dwindling supply of ammo could not make clear enough.

He shoulder-checked a suit of armor on his next clumsy side-step, and his eyes lit on the whopping double-bladed axe clutched in its empty steel gauntlets. He seized it, tearing the handle from its owner with a rough yank that sent the gauntlets clattering to the floor. The B.O.W. was closing in fast, its claws outstretched and mouth gaping open in a snarl. Leon braced the handle against the floor and held the axe up just in time for the jumping B.O.W. to impale itself on the blade. It fell limp with a last, wheezing growl.

With a small shove, the B.O.W. tumbled to the ground, axe standing out from its rib cage like a flagpole. He shook his arms out and grimaced. Goddamn it, he should have checked the ceiling.

Always check the ceilings. He leaned against the wall to catch his breath. Wesker had warned him. That was real nice of him—maybe he was taking the whole 'partner' idea seriously. Yeah, right. The more pressing question was, _how_ had Wesker known to warn him? The room held a lot of broken furniture, some faded red stains, and candle holders, but no figures in black watching from a shadowy corner. He was alone. Baffled, he raised a finger to his new ear piece and pressed the button.

"Wesker. What the hell."

"I found a monitor room. The coverage isn't perfect, but I can see most of this wing from here."

So now Wesker could spy on him too. Like his day wasn't fantastic enough already.

"I hope you're not planning to sit back and watch me do all the work."

"I've encountered a road block of a different sort. You recall the deer statue we saw earlier? Have you found any other animal statues?"

Leon had a sudden sinking feeling.

"You found a puzzle?"

"I found a puzzle," Wesker confirmed.

"I hate this architect," Leon muttered under his breath. "There was a wolf back there."

"Good. I need to know what its inscription said."

"Hang on, let me go back and read it." Leon sighed. He should have known the statues would be important somehow. Luckily, he'd already cleared the path between this room and the statue. Backtracking went quickly, and would have been even faster if he hadn't stopped to check every ceiling before passing underneath. The encounter in the dining room had put him on edge. Even so, it took only a short job to return to the statue.

"Okay, are you ready?"

"Turn twice beneath the dawn  
slide three east, past the pawn.  
There to your sight  
wings, red as blood,  
shall grab the sun."

Wesker grumbled something about wings that Leon couldn't catch, then he paused.

"You're sure it says dawn?" Wesker asked.

"Yeah."

"Dammit. Very well. Be on the lookout for any other statues. We've found the deer, and I saw a dove on the cameras. There should be one more."

"Got it."

Animal statues, huh. Leon double-checked the rooms along the hall as he made his way back, just in case he'd missed something. When he returned to the dining hall, he stopped short. A thick trail of blood wound its way from the disarmed suit of armor to the eastern doorway. The door lay on the floor nearby, in two splintered pieces. No sign of the monster's corpse anywhere. Leon slowly lifted a hand to his earpiece.

"Wesker, did you see what happened to the B.O.W. I just killed?"

"I was not monitoring that area," Wesker replied. Maybe the B.O.W. had hit him in the head, because he could have sworn the man sounded almost apologetic. "I shall see if I can track it down." The transmission cut.

"Great," Leon told the empty room.

Either the B.O.W. wasn't dead and would come back later, angrier and nastier, or something bigger had made off with it. Leon didn't like either option. He bypassed the eastern door and went out through the other door just past the head of the table.

It was like walking into a completely different castle. White walls all but buried under gold reliefs enclosed a large, airy room with mirror-bright tile. And there were cherubs. Everywhere. Clustered in the corners, clinging to the support pillars, spilling out from the friezes, each unsmiling and pristine childish face turned towards the doorway. Leon felt the itch of a hundred eyes staring at him.

"They're just statues, Leon," Wesker said, and having that voice come out of nowhere was a small heart attack by itself.

"Just because they look like they can't move, doesn't mean they won't," Leon replied, grimacing at a memory. One moment you think everything's normal, the next you're running away from the 40-foot-tall mechanical statue of a small man with a Napoleon complex. God, that whole mission had gotten weird.

"Speaking from personal experience?"

"Uh-huh."

"Is that why you've been giving the suits of armor such a wide berth?"

"I don't want to talk about it."

There were two doors. On the right stood a grand double door laced with ornate ironwork. Still more cherubs clustered about its frame, their empty stares warning anyone who should attempt to open it. Above the door hung a plaque, which read: "Even in Arcadia, I am there." There was something else engraved underneath the words, too small and distant to make out. To the left stood a small, wooden door, plain as a closet entrance and a whole lot friendlier-looking than its fancy neighbor.

"It seems both doors lead to the same destination," Wesker said. "I would take the left one, were I you."

Leon stopped mid-step. He _had_ been going for that door, before Wesker recommended it. Now he examined it with renewed suspicion. It _looked_ innocent. He went to the other door anyway.

"Still don't trust me?"

"No one is stupid enough to trust you, Wesker."

The double doors swung open at a touch, unveiling a hallway that could have come from a french palace. Brightly lit and perfectly inviting, with crystal chandeliers hanging from painted ceilings and gold support pillars. Leon could have driven a semi-truck through this thing without brushing the ceiling. And, it went without saying, every available surface was plastered with cherubs.

Leon trusted it about as well as he trusted Wesker. Well, he was nothing if not stubborn. If he died here, he could console himself that he had stuck to his principles. Which principle, he didn't know. Whichever one involved not listening to directions from treacherous mad scientists.

The door slammed shut behind him the moment he crossed the threshold, the click of the lock echoing in the cavernous hall. He hated his life.

Nowhere to go but forward. He kept close to the wall as he moved, expecting traps to target the middle of the area. He noticed the suspicious grooves in the floor about half a second before the line of sawblades popped out of them, directly behind him. Each polished blade hung half a foot away from its neighbor, and the entire line moved forward, the metal rattling as it spun. Even Leon wasn't lean enough to fit through those gaps.

"Knew it!" he hissed, breaking into a sprint. A wall of spikes shot out of each wall, ruining his hug-the-wall strategy and narrowing the safe space to a 4-foot-wide stretch down the center of the hall. Leon picked up the pace.

Next came guillotines raining from the ceiling in staggered sequence. Leon had only seconds to memorize the pattern before the sawblades would start carving inches off his backside. Run past two, pause, run past one, pause again, duck, and god where had that giant swinging axe even come from, run forward three, and he was past the guillotines. Then he heard the screeching, and realized the painted ceiling had ended. A latticework of bars crossed the ceiling, through which half a dozen gleaming eyes stared down at him. The bars retracted.

Thirty minutes later, Leon collapsed against the wall outside the death hall, his eyes wide and sightless, staring at the small, plain door in the opposite wall. Without looking, he pulled a glob of bloodied slime out of his hair and threw it to the ground with a wet plop. He wheezed like he had just run a marathon, his arms were covered in scrapes and bruises, and he had a grand total of 2 bullets left to his name.

"I did tell you to take the left door," Wesker said in his ear.

Leon ground his teeth together and didn't respond. He could not tell where the camera was, so he made a very rude gesture at the ceiling.

"Charming."

No rest for the wicked, Leon told himself. He shoved his battered body off the wall. Only one door would lead forward, and he took it, wincing a little when the motion of opening the door strained his shoulder.

"I must admit you have some skill, Kennedy."

"Lived this long, haven't I," Leon replied. The next room, to his luck, had no infected inside. It had an open floor plan, with few places for anything to hide. The ceiling was clear, too.

"You're quite creative at using your environment."

"Yeah. Well. They never send me with enough ammunition." Speaking of which, there were some tables lining the wall. He checked their drawers, hopeful, but found only pens and some scraps of paper.

"'Enough ammunition,' for an outbreak, could arm a small army."

"Ain't that the truth."

"If you need ammo, you may be able to find some in—"

The line crackled, and Wesker's voice drowned in static.

"Wesker? Wesker please finish that sentence."

"Ah, Mr. Kennedy, is it? How are you enjoying your tour of my castle?"

"For god's sake..." Leon muttered. "Angelus. Getting lonely in your tower?"

"Oh, I'm never lonely. I have my children with me."

"Your mutated freaks, you mean?"

"Always so rude, you brawny types," Angelus sighed. "Here I go to all the trouble of jacking your line just to give you warning, and you insult my family."

"If it has tentacles and eats human flesh, I wouldn't invite it to the reunion," Leon said. "Just get to your point."

"There's another man in the castle with us. An old colleague of mine. I used to think he was quite bright, but he turned out to be just as petty and narrow-minded as all the others. In any case, should he approach you, you mustn't trust him. His name is Albert Wesker."

Leon couldn't help it. He started laughing so hard he lost balance and fell against the wall behind him. It sounded manic and unhinged even to his own ears, exhaustion and one too many blows taking their toll. Who could blame him for being a little punch-drunk?

"...Mr. Kennedy?"

"I _know_ who Albert Wesker is," Leon managed between guffaws. He gasped to catch his breath. "Trust me. I'm friends with some of his worst enemies."

"Then you know how dangerous he is! I know we didn't get off on the right foot, but if you help me destroy him, I'd be willing to forgive your transgressions and make a place for you here in Arcadia."

"Aren't you generous." Leon rolled his eyes to the ceiling. "Listen, pal. I've got a mission, and that mission involves bringing in you, not Wesker."

"Tch. Fine! Then you can burn with all the rest of them!" Angelus cut off in another crackle of static.

"Burn, huh?" Leon said. He still didn't know what Angelus's plan was, only that he'd made threats against the U.S. and they were taking it seriously. Given his obsessive motif, Leon wouldn't be surprised if he wanted to turn the rest of the world into a literal fiery hellscape.

"I see he hasn't changed," Wesker said. Leon jumped.

"Wesker?"

"Mm. Not the greatest with technology, old Angelus. He didn't manage to cut me out, he just butt in on our conversation."

"So, he could still be listening?"

"There is one way to check." Wesker cleared his throat. "The Ashfords were inbred morons who wasted their lives on worthless research."

They waited in silence for a spell.

"I think it's safe to say he's not listening."

"Ashfords?"

"Hold on." Wesker paused. Then, with more urgency, "Leon, run to that white door in the—"

"How about you just tell me what you see and let me decide how to react?" Leon snapped.

"Very well. There is a forty-foot-long B.O.W. rapidly approaching your location from the south. That is, behind you."

On cue, a booming roar shook the room so hard it knocked a curtain of dust from the ceiling. Leon bolted for the white door. The shaking followed him all the way through the next hall, punctuated by wailing roars that got louder and louder no matter how fast he pushed himself. It was gaining.

Stone crashed somewhere far behind him as a wall met its wrath. Angelus had this whole big, beautiful castle that must have taken millions of dollars to furnish and decorate, and he just let his pets trash the place. Unbelievable. Somewhere, a sculptor was probably crying.

Another loud crash behind him, much too close for comfort. Leon risked a glance over his shoulder.

The B.O.W. loomed over the wreckage of the door Leon had just passed through, stone dust settling in the grotesque folds of its face, coating the many hands which held it upright. It looked like a giant yellow slug with arms and a human head. A pair of twitching green legs dangled from its mouth. Well, now he knew why all the rooms in this place had ceilings to put a cathedral to shame. Its dozen arms burst into motion, hauled its thick tube of a body forward with unlikely speed.

"You don't even fit the theme!" Leon yelled at it. It wailed back at him.

"There's a fork up ahead," Wesker said. "The left path leads to another trap hall."

Leon began angling to the right, then thought better of it and took the left fork.

"My thoughts exactly," Wesker said, a hint of a smile in his voice.

The trap hall, as Wesker called it, had a design Leon had seen before. There was no tempting floor near the walls, just black, empty pit, with a wide stone bridge in the center. Suspicious holes covered the walls, several panels of the ceiling had mismatched tiles, and a quartet of giant axe blades swung back and forth lazily over the bridge.

"Timing will be critical. There is only a 5 second delay between trigger and deployment."

"Can you tell where the trigger is?"

"If I had to guess...it's somewhere on the floor about three feet from the first blade."

"Right." Leon twisted around, nerves tight as bowstrings. The B.O.W.'s hideous mug rounded the corner, one eye melting down its blubbery face. "Are there any B.O.W.s that aren't ugly as sin?"

"I always liked the Hunters."

"Right." Leon had never run into anything called a Hunter. "Five second delay, huh." He eyed the pattern of the axe blade swings, looked back at the approaching B.O.W. and got a feel for its speed. While he couldn't calculate trajectories in his head, he had always had a great instinct for timing. "Wait for it..." he told himself, forced himself to hold still as the monster stomped closer.

The B.O.W. slammed its too-human hands into the stone one after the other, crawling faster and faster now that its prey was in sight, the lopsided mouth gaping open. He had a great view of all the limbs stuck between its crooked teeth. Had this thing been a person at one point?

"Leon..."

"Don't psyche me out," Leon snapped. Wesker mercifully subsided.

 _Now_.

He went for it, dodging the swipe of one enormous hand, not faltering at the ominous clinking of metal that sounded when his foot depressed the trigger hidden in the floor. Five seconds was a generous estimate. He had barely cleared the first axe before dozens of ominous metal 'chinks' sounded from the walls, and a moment later two waves of spears shot out from their holes. Each and every one missed him, some by mere inches. The B.O.W. was not so lucky. Its screams followed him as he ran, approaching the next blade.

"The second—"

"I see it," Leon hissed.

The second axe swung back a little too fast, but Leon couldn't afford to stop. He dropped into a slide, ducking under the blade by a scant inch, and fumbled to his feet straight afterward. The first of the suspiciously discolored ceiling panels fell open, a spiked crusher slamming the bridge in front of him, and the others followed in sequence. With careful timing, he darted his way past them.

Every trap that Leon narrowly avoided hit the B.O.W. full in the face, yet still it pressed on, made angrier and uglier by every wound. After too short a sprint, Leon skidded to a stop at the end of the line, the goddamn B.O.W. still coming and very few traps left to throw at it. The traps just weren't doing enough damage to its head. Leon took aim and fired one of his two remaining bullets right into the creature's left eye. It reeled back, screaming, just long enough for the very last crusher to nail it on the forehead.

It punched a hole in the B.O.W.'s skull. At last the monster fell, two fingers twitching under the last fading sparks of its nervous system. But this wasn't Leon's first rodeo—he waited a moment to make sure it wasn't going to get back up before lowering his firearm.

He hoped the room behind him led back around somehow, because the thing's fat corpse made one hell of a road block. He almost felt sorry for the B.O.W., lying there leaking like a smashed apple strudel, a mass of spears and three bent axe heads sticking out from its sides.

"Leon?" Wesker asked.

"What?"

"Just checking. You're in a blind spot."

"Your concern's real touching."

"In any case, it looks like this one won't be bothering us again."

"Yeah," Leon said. "Looks like he finally... _got the point_."

There followed a moment of horrified silence. Wesker muttered something about thinking Ada had been exaggerating.

"Problem?" Leon asked, all innocence.

"Leon. I know you _think_ you're terribly witty, but I regret to inform you that your sense of humor is actually terrible."

"What? You don't think he had a bad exSPEARience?"

"I'm cutting off the transmission now."

Leon grinned to himself. Nothing sweetened a victory over a huge monster like discovering a way to annoy your enemy.

He wiped the sweat from his forehead and turned his back on the corpse, confronting the plain wooden door behind him. Plain doors were good, he'd decided. Unassuming. Nonthreatening. It creaked like hell when he opened it, giving way to a parlor whose plush carpet he ruined with bloody footprints.

There in the center, attended on all sides by couches, stood the final statue. This one depicted a snake bent over backwards, jaws gaping wide in a silent scream. It was caught in the pincers of some enormous insect whose head poked out from the pedestal. Leon felt a little uneasy just looking at it.

"I found the last statue," he told Wesker. "It's a snake."

"Ah. I suspected as much. What does the inscription say?"

"Three times you slithered  
between the claws of your better.  
At midnight you turned left,  
your back to the sacrifice.

You nipped at my heels.  
I'll crush your skull."

Wesker surprised Leon by laughing.

"He thinks he's so subtle."

"You guys got a history or something?"

"Mm. He once worked under me at Umbrella. He always did resent having to answer to a younger man."

"Seems a little deeper than some old workplace drama," Leon said, eyeing the agonized posture of the snake.

"Does it? Umbrella did attract very volatile personalities. In any case, I have all I need. I'll be leaving the monitors, so you'll have to watch your own back from now on."

"Gee, how will I ever survive."

"Try not to die," Wesker advised brightly, and left with a click.

Leon sighed. That got Wesker off his back for a while. Now he just had to find another way back upstairs, so he could...meet back up with Wesker and keep an eye on him.

This mission had 'long day' written all over it.

* * *

Wesker lingered in the monitor room, watching the unflattering image of the dead B.O.W. stretched out over the bridge like the world's most morbid pincushion. Like Leon, Wesker had doubts that the creature was really down for the count. It was a natural response for anyone who spent enough time around B.O.W.s. He still couldn't see Leon on any of the monitors. Entertaining as it had been to watch the agent fight his way through the lower floor, he had work to do.

He returned to the adjacent room, where four statues set on movable pedestals stood scattered across a floor littered with tracks. The deer, the wolf, the dove, and the snake. Dr. Marcus had once had a similar mechanism installed in the old training facility. The pieces all needed to be moved to the correct places, but they had to follow the right path or they wouldn't unlock the door. He had all the riddles from the inscriptions worked out, and every statue was in place save for one: the snake.

"Three times you slithered between the claws of your better," he recited to himself. Clearly, if he was bowing to Angelus's bloated ego, that meant the snake had to orbit—what else but the dove, the only one with wings. It took a matter of minutes to manipulate the snake through its paces, and he was rewarded with the click of the lock opening.

A flash of movement from the corner of his eye drew his attention back to the snake just in time to watch it crumble under the blow of a weight dropping from the ceiling. The shattered fragments of its head tumbled over his boots, a single red glass eye stopping to glimmer up at him. Nearly the twin of his own eyes, from pupil shape to the particular gradient of gold to red. Angelus couldn't have made the parallel more obvious if he'd given the statue sunglasses.

"Yes, yes, you're very threatening," he said, a little smirk creeping up his face. He kicked the eye away and made his way toward the door. It was almost cute, how much effort Angelus put into his petty symbolism. "Tantrum all you like. It won't bring Alexia back."

* * *

End Note:

"So then he says, 'your right hand comes off'?"

"Now you're just making things up."

"God, I wish I was."

-Ada and Wesker at some point, probably.


	3. Wesker has a Bad Experience

**Chapter 3: In Which Wesker has a Bad Experience**

* * *

The plain black door before Leon stood at odds with the rest of the hallway, as if someone had stolen it from an office building. A small silver placard screwed to the wood read, "East Wing Monitor Room'. Leon opened the door, hoping for and yet dreading a glimpse of blond hair within the dim room. To his relief and disappointment, the room proved empty. He crossed to the wall of screens and scanned each in turn for a figure in black. While he saw a number of rooms he recognized, there was no sign of Wesker.

By a large stroke of luck, Leon had not encountered anything more menacing than a fly on his trip upstairs. Wesker must have been busy clearing out the ghouls. Still, Leon was short on bullets and starting to worry about it. He'd searched every nook and cranny between the slug and the monitor room for a dropped box of ammunition, finding nothing but dust bunnies and bloodstains.

Maybe it was silly of him to expect an ammo cache in a medieval castle. Yet, Wesker had mentioned just that before they were interrupted. An ugly knot of pride, paranoia, and general distaste had kept Leon from radioing the man to ask about it. He didn't want to sound desperate, and he sure as hell didn't want to rely on Wesker. More and more it seemed like he had no other choice. He was running out of places to search, and a single handgun bullet was not going to get him very far.

There was no helping it. He'd have to give up his moment of peace and call on the devil again. Maybe if he sounded casual enough, Wesker wouldn't guess how dire Leon's situation actually was.

Yeah, right.

"Hey. Wesker."

"Leon."

"What was that you were saying before the line got jacked? Something about some ammo somewhere?"

"Ah, yes. It's unlikely my men were able to use all of their rounds before they died. You may have luck searching their bodies. A large group of them fell right outside—" He was interrupted by a sudden cacophony of grinding metal on his end, followed by a hissed "Shit." The line went quiet.

"Wesker? ...Wesker!" Goddammit, not again. Not right before the critical piece of information. "Now who has an awful sense of humor?"

No response.

Leon blew out a sigh, scrubbing a hand through his hair and smearing the blond strands with more dirt and blood. Wesker was probably fine. The way Chris spun it, the man was practically invincible. And if he wasn't? The world would be better off with one less predator prowling around. Besides, Leon had survived worse situations without any kind of support. There had been times during the Raccoon City disaster when he had to run through mobs of zombies with only a combat knife and 3 shotgun shells. He would figure something out.

That's what he kept telling himself as he continued his careful exploration of the second floor. Then, he came to the room whose top level could only be reached via a lift that required a crank to move. Leon could just make out one of the keys for that hundred-spear barrier glinting on a shelf up there.

He tapped a finger to his ear piece and hesitantly called Wesker's name. Silence. Great.

A muffled curse filtered through the wall, quiet and reverberating, a hallway echo carried from some nearby room. He poked his head out into the hall, listening hard for any other sound. Had that been...?

"Wesker?" he called.

"...here."

He followed the voice into a polished box of a room with a floor bright enough to reflect the gold arches of the ceiling. As he had suspected, Wesker had run into one of the insane booby traps littering the castle, and boy, was this one a doozy.

Wesker stood at the back half of the room, suspended in an awkward twisted posture between two crushing walls, his outstretched arms trembling faintly under the effort of keeping the stone from closing in on him. If it were just the walls, Wesker could have escaped already.

He was also pinned in place by the dozen barbed, hook-ended spears which jabbed out from the surrounding ceiling, floor, and walls. An ordinary human would be dead several times over from the amount of metal impaling him from so many angles. Wesker looked merely annoyed.

His red eyes met Leon's, clearly visible, his sunglasses having fallen to the floor some feet away. They really were slit just like a snake's. His gaze was assessing, wary. One of his eyebrows twitched periodically, the only outward sign of his pain.

"Bit of trouble?" Leon asked, his tone wry.

"Nothing I can't handle." Wesker replied, taking a hand off the wall and tugging at one of the spikes. While the metal bent like cardboard to his fingers, it was hooked on something inside him and refused to come out. The wall inched forward with an ominous grind of stone on stone, and after a few brief seconds, Wesker had to abandon his task to shove it back.

Talk about going overboard with your traps. What was the point of shoving someone full of spikes and crushing them? This place's architect must have had his picture in the dictionary next to the word 'overkill.'

Then again, Angelus did know Wesker. Maybe this was a measured response.

"Did you need something?" Wesker asked.

"I found one of the keys for that barrier, but someone's going to have to turn a crank to get me up to it."

"You need me, then." Wesker sighed, a flicker of frustration furrowing his brows. "If you'd like to speed this up, there should be a mechanism to retract the trap in here somewhere."

"That would rip you to pieces," Leon protested.

"And? I'll heal."

Leon swallowed hard, averting his eyes when Wesker reached down to work at the spike through his chest. That one was definitely caught on a bone or something, and the thought of it just ripping out—he didn't think he could put anyone through that, even Wesker, super-healing be damned.

"I don't want to see your insides today, thanks," he said. "And I don't need to be showered in infected blood, either."

"Actually, I'm not contagious anymore," Wesker said. He shoved the wall back again, the mechanism behind it squealing in protest. "But fine, if you'd rather wait."

It would take hours at the rate he was going. Leon wasn't cruel enough to leave him like that. That left Leon with only one option. He came to the man's side, kneeling down so he could examine a spike run up through Wesker's abdomen. The barbs looked even nastier up close. Extracting it was going to be really tricky.

"What are you doing?"

"Speeding things up."

He placed both hands on the spike and carefully twisted it about, getting a gauge of how he could move it. It wasn't nearly as rigid as he was expecting. It could turn, and with enough force he could get it to retract backwards.

"I may have broken something with my initial thrashing," Wesker said when Leon voiced his observations. How he could be so blasé about this was beyond Leon's understanding.

"You do still feel pain, right?" Leon asked.

"Yes," Wesker replied, glaring down at Leon like he was an idiot.

"Just checking."

Leon got down to carefully working the barbed head of the spear out from under Wesker's ribs. It was tough going when he couldn't see which way the hook pointed.

"Just yank it out," Wesker said, sharp with impatience. Leon ignored him. It took half a minute of careful twisting, easing the metal out inch by inch, before the stubborn hook slid free.

"One down," Leon said. "Eleven to go."

Wesker hung his head and growled.

The first three went fairly smoothly. Leon tackled ones he could easily reach from Wesker's side, and only the very first had been badly stuck. In order to even reach the others, Leon had to slide in between the walls with Wesker, into a space as wide as the other man's arm span. This left him all but plastered to the man's back, one leg bent to avoid the spikes, hands reaching around front to work on a spear gone through Wesker's shoulder.

His whole world narrowed to the careful work under his hands and the swell of Wesker's breathing against his chest, a steady rhythm broken only by the occasional gasp of pain. Wesker's eyes never left him, watching silently, rarely blinking, a disk of red always hovering in the corner of Leon's vision. It was too intimate, too awkward. He had to say something.

"So, I've got a question."

Wesker's red eye rolled up from watching Leon's hands to settle on his face, the one visible eyebrow arched. Leon ignored the look, scrambled for an actual question to follow up with.

"What made you get into this business anyway? Did you go to your high school career fair and decide you wanted to make monsters for a living?"

"You mean, why did I get into virology?" Wesker asked, clearly surprised.

Leon hummed his assent.

Wesker took his time answering, like he'd forgotten the reason and had to pry for it. By degrees, the concentration on his face eased into an almost warm nostalgia.

"I wanted to cure Ebola."

"Cure it?" Leon twisted the spike wrong in his shock, and Wesker's face turned a sudden ashen gray, his eyes bulging. "Sorry," Leon stammered, quickly righting the spike and easing it out gently. "Think I heard wrong. Did you say cure?"

"Surprised?" Wesker asked in a rasp. His voice recovered within a moment, as if Leon had never blundered. "I had a phase in my youth when I wanted to help save people. It was a...rebellion, of sorts." His lips curled in a playful smirk.

"Rebellion against what?"

"Ebola had just been discovered, and was stirring the medical community into a frenzy. I'd always been fascinated by viruses. The challenge of them, the danger, a constantly shifting enemy who wasn't even biologically alive. So, yes, I wanted to be the one to stop it. It was a nice, ego-boosting thought." He chuckled.

"So what happened?"

"I joined Umbrella. A world renowned leader in pharmaceuticals and medical research. I thought they were my best chance for acquiring the resources I needed to achieve my goal. They were even tracking ebola already. You may not realize this, but the research required to cure a virus, or to weaponize one, is the same. By the time I realized where Umbrella's true interest lay, it was too late to back out. And I had seen enough of humanity to realize it wasn't worth saving."

"Bullshit," Leon growled, wrenching a spike out rougher than called for on purpose. Wesker shuddered in agony. His eyes slit open, and he smirked, knowing and amused, as if he had expected that response and even scored a point by provoking it. "There are plenty of good people in this world—" Leon continued.

"Are there really? Or do they just lack the power and opportunity to do anything truly awful? You may have touched Umbrella once or twice, but I was inside it. I saw how easily people were corrupted by that place, how weak a human's will truly is. It only takes a little pressure, an absence of responsibility, an assurance that the victims are somehow inferior, and humans will do awful things to one another.

"Never forget, Leon, we live in a world that not only allowed Umbrella to exist, but enabled it to thrive. That alone should tell you all you need to know about your precious humanity."

This was too intense a conversation to have with the side of Wesker's head. Leon shifted around to his front, meeting Wesker's eyes straight on.

"Umbrella only 'thrived' because it hid so well. There might be some sick people out there, and Umbrella hired most of them, but a few bad eggs can't damn the whole human race."

"Oh, it didn't hide, Leon. It just threw money around until all of your 'good people' were happy to look the other way. Even when S.T.A.R.S. tried to spread the truth, the citizens of Raccoon City wouldn't listen to them. It was easier to let Umbrella do as it wanted, and so long as everyone's pockets got lined no one cared if a few hikers went missing."

"You can't blame anyone for not believing it back then. If some guy came out of nowhere and told you, I don't know, Wal-Mart was secretly breeding alien head-parasites to control their customers, would you believe him?"

"But I already knew about that," Wesker replied.

"What? They're really—" Then he noticed Wesker's lips twitching. "You're messing with me."

"I'm proving my point. You're willing to believe because you're not clinging to some safe, comfortable little life."

"I—" Leon pressed forward, knocking his hip into a spear. Wesker winced, and all at once Leon remembered what he was supposed to be doing. "Sorry," he said, dropping down into a half-crouch with one leg sticking out of the trap so he could reach the spear just above Wesker's hip.

Time to change the subject to a less infuriating topic so he could actually concentrate.

"You make it sound like you weren't a big fan of Umbrella," Leon said.

"Ha. An entire company of morons and madmen. Although they did provide some excellent opportunities, I won't pretend I was sorry to see them fold."

Well that was one thing they had in common. They lapsed back into awkward silence as Leon untangled metal barbs from the pouches on Wesker's combat vest.

"And you?" Wesker asked. "How did you get into this 'business?'"

"You know that story. Hungover rookie cop, got caught up in the Raccoon City outbreak. Hey, lean over a little to the right. Yeah, like that."

"You were hungover?"

"Yeah. Girlfriend had just left me, so I made the bright decision to drink myself into a stupor the night before I had to leave for Raccoon."

"I'm not sure if that's impressive or pathetic," Wesker said. "But why are you still here? You didn't have to look at another B.O.W. ever again once you escaped that city. Yet here you are, the government's professional monster hunter."

How to answer this question for someone like Wesker, who couldn't see the value of human life? Leon braced one hand on Wesker's hip, talking lowly as he worked the spear up and out through the back.

"You're right. People are weak. Put 'em in the wrong situation and they panic. They do stupid shit. They hurt each other. But that doesn't mean they deserve death." He looked up into Wesker's blaze-red eyes. "It means they need help."

"And you would be that help, is it? Hmph. How noble." Wesker looked away. "It's amazing how someone who's seen so much can still be so naive."

"I prefer the term 'optimistic."

"And what if the person in need was someone like Angelus?"

"I'm not a saint," Leon replied, his face twisting in a grimace.

Wesker hummed, his head tilting toward Leon's hands which were working so carefully to guide the spike out without hooking any intestines.

"I need you," Leon said before Wesker could raise the obvious objection. Jesus Christ, things he never expected to say to Wesker while he had his hands on the man's hip. "And I'm just speeding things up, remember?"

Wesker snorted.

"Whatever you need to tell yourself, Leon."

Just two left now: another one in the chest which Leon had been avoiding because it looked damn close to a lung, and one in the thigh. He went for the leg first, expecting it to be easier. It must have been right on a nerve or something, because the second Leon even brushed it Wesker went white and all but doubled over. There went all doubts about the man's capacity to feel pain.

Leon reeled back, startled by the extreme reaction. "Shit. Uh..."

"For god's sake, Leon," Wesker hissed.

Right. OK. There wouldn't be any gently easing this one out. He'd have to heave it out as fast as his strength allowed. Wesker watched him, apparently recovered, tension radiating from him as Leon's hand approached the spear. Tension was going to seize up the muscle and make this even more difficult. Leon needed to do something about that.

"So I've always wondered," he began, ignoring the burning glare Wesker leveled at him. "How many times have you slept with Chris Redfield?"

"What—?" Wesker choked above him.

Leon struck fast as a viper, seizing the spear and hauling on it as hard as he could, one boot planted on Wesker's thigh to brace himself. The spear came loose with a wet, awful tearing sound. Wesker seized up so hard he couldn't even scream. The injured leg folded like wet paper, his hips dipping to follow it towards the floor. Leon surged up and caught him before he collapsed, propping him up like a living crutch until his healing kicked in. The walls inched closer, pressed into the back of his heels and nudged him forward. If Wesker faltered now, the both of them were about to get a hell of a lot thinner. And flatter.

Before he could worry too hard about that, Wesker straightened under his grasp, the shaking arm stretched across Leon's vision forced itself straight, and the pressure eased off Leon's back. By degrees the shuddering rasp of Wesker's breath near his ear evened out into something calmer. Wesker angled his head so he could glare at Leon. Leon responded with a cheeky grin, shameless and strained.

"He was too uptight to sleep with a commanding officer," Wesker said.

"You mean you considered it?" Leon blinked. He hadn't been expecting any answer, much less that one.

"He's easy enough on the eyes, and he wasn't so annoying back then. Pickings were slim at the R.P.D."

"What, no interest in Jill Valentine?"

"I never said that." Wesker grinned. "She wasn't nearly as straight-laced."

Was Wesker implying they had...? Jill would definitely kill him if he pursued that line of conversation any further.

"Huh. Never pegged you as bi."

"It's never mattered to me what equipment my partners might have. It's unimportant."

So he was happy with anything he found. Knowing Wesker's line of work, that list could include tentacles, a second face, eyeballs, or even teeth. The disturbing mental imagery distracted Leon for a moment until he realized that interrogating his trapped enemy's sexuality was probably crossing a line somewhere.

"Sorry, didn't mean to pry."

"You're good at prying. I can't remember the last time I talked this much about myself."

"Missed my calling as an interrogator."

"It's a shame we never had a chance to work together at the R.P.D. before I had to put down my S.T.A.R.S."

Leon paused, looked up into Wesker's expectant eyes, read the challenge there. Then he continued to work the last spear out as gentle as you please. Wesker's chest shook against his hand on a quiet puff of laughter.

"If I didn't know better, I'd think you were trying to make me hurt you." Leon leaned forward so he could better see what he was doing as he worked the spear out from the back. This left his mouth just level with Wesker's ear as he asked, in a low tone, "You got a kink or something?"

"I'm a scientist at heart," Wesker purred back into Leon's ear. "I can't resist testing things." From the corner of his eye, Leon could just make out those eyes flicking up and down over his face. "You're not entirely straight yourself, are you?"

Leon cleared his throat, focusing on getting the last barb untangled from Wesker's shirt. "You're awful direct," he said. He didn't confirm or deny. He preferred women. Sometimes, he went for men. But men and women were different, and he loved different things about them. Simple as that.

At long last, the final spear came out. Wesker grabbed Leon around the waist and hauled them both out of there, letting the walls crush shut in their wake. Leon hung on to Wesker, just to make sure he wasn't going to fall.

"That was an unpleasant distraction," Wesker said. He eased away from Leon, rubbing feeling back into his arms. Leon's hands hurt just thinking about holding those walls apart this long.

"Yeah. What say we put some distance between ourselves and this hell trap?"

"Sadly, one of the keys we need is now behind that wall."

"Oh." Leon looked about for the reset switch Wesker had mentioned before. He found it next to one of the wall sconces, a small and unassuming button sitting among the scroll work. At a press, the walls began to glide apart. They were halfway retracted when a quartet of sawblades shot up from the floor and thoroughly diced the air between the walls.

"Well," Wesker said into the shocked silence. "I suppose it's a good thing you didn't take the easy way."

Leon swallowed. "Yeah." He could see the key glinting on the now visible back wall, seated behind a barred window. He took a cautious step closer. "How did you trigger it before—?"

A hand closed like steel around his shoulder, wrenching him backward. Leon looked with surprise into Wesker's irritated eyes.

"Let the person who can survive the trap fiddle with it, won't you?" he said, and shoved Leon towards the door.

Leon opened his mouth to protest, got a good look at Wesker, and stopped. The man wavered on his feet—he must have been exhausted, but he'd never let himself collapse in front of Leon.  
Alright, he could take a hint.

"Fine, I'll meet you in the other room then. Fifth door to the left from here." Then Leon remembered his ammo supply. "Hey, I don't want to mention it outright in case something else happens, but—"

"One of the ground floor rooms leading out from that hall where we first met," Wesker interrupted.

"Thanks."

Leon left the room, letting the door shut behind him. When, seconds later, he heard a soft 'thump' from inside as if a man had just fallen to the floor, he shook his head and kept walking.

* * *

End Note: Most of my characterization for Wesker comes from a mixture of the earlier games and Wesker's Report 2, a side document released with Code Veronica. If you have any curiosity about the old days at Umbrella, you should give it a read. It's nice and spooky. It was only released in Japan originally, but there's an abundance of fan translations out there now. Some people even throw it up on youtube with atmospheric music in the background.

As a big believer in the Kinsey Scale, I've put Wesker at a solid 3, and Leon's around a 2.


	4. Leon Still Doesn't Find Ammo

**Chapter 4: In Which Leon Still Doesn't Find Ammo**

* * *

Cold stone walls to the left, cold stone walls to the right, a long, damp passage before him, and on every side the same bas relief of a weeping angel repeated ad nauseam. Wesker had been wandering this maze for the past 15 minutes, and oh, how he pined for a ball of string. If he had known the west wing's ground floor held nothing but this damnable maze, he would have taken the upper floor and made Leon search here instead.

He sank against the wall for a minute, slipped one hand inside his shirt to feel his chest. The flesh burned beneath his fingers like a live coal. His lips curled into a snarl. Every B.O.W., save the once immortal Lisa Trevor, had limits on its regeneration. After enough damage, the virus would either panic-mutate the organism into a nonfunctional mess, or the healing rate would slow more and more until it could no longer outpace the damage, leading vital systems to fail.

Wesker was no Lisa Trevor. In terms of sheer stamina, he would not even rank in the top ten. His apparent invincibility was only a carefully constructed mask, aided by his body's tendency to heal the surface before knitting the insides. The heat gave him away. Rapid cell growth was not without its waste energy.

That trap had strained him more than he wanted to admit. If Leon had thought to break his arms rather than free him from the spikes, Wesker could have died there. Yet, as far as he could tell, the thought had not even crossed the agent's mind. His one concern had been saving Wesker from the moment he had entered the room. Was he so short-sighted? Or did he suffer a crippling overabundance of compassion? Wesker tried to imagine his other enemies in the same position. The younger Redfield might have done as Leon had. Chris, he might have persuaded to hit the trap reset button. The lovely Jill Valentine? A toss-up. His own allies at H.C.F. would have put him down with a grin.

Leon never failed to surprise him. From the moment he'd first learned of the man's existence, his name had been attached to two astonishing facts: first, that he'd survived the nightmare of Raccoon City. Second, that he'd destroyed G, William Birkin's finest creation. Every glancing encounter since then, Leon had outpaced his expectations, sometimes with disastrous results. So long as the agent continued to stubbornly draw breath, Wesker needed to learn how to predict him, before he ruined something truly important.

Speaking of the devil, his earpiece crackled to life.

"I've cleared the upper floor. No sign of anything suspicious. I think you're right, the last key must be somewhere in that maze."

"It will take some time to search," Wesker said. "It seems quite extensive."

"Alright. I'm heading back towards the great hall."

He ended the transmission.

Wesker pushed off the wall. Even in this state, he was far superior to a human. By the time he rejoined with Leon, he should be back in top shape. Three dead ends and five minutes of frustration later, Leon contacted him again.

"I found the place your dead men wandered off to. Looks like I missed one hell of a party. Blood everywhere, couple limbs. No bodies."

Wesker snickered at Leon's obvious irritation. The agent had been very annoyed when he backtracked all the way to the monitor room, only to find that Wesker's men had already reanimated. He must have been very desperate for resources if he was going to such lengths for ammunition. Wesker had less than a clip left himself, and had resorted to seizing carriers by the head and pulverizing their skulls against the walls. Messy, but it did the trick.

"Something probably ate them," he told Leon. "Perhaps you should try cutting open the belly of the next large B.O.W. you find."

"Think I'll pass, thanks."

Leon cut back out. Wesker turned a corner to another dead end, sighed, and retreated to his last turning. Something snarled behind a wall. If only the walls didn't stretch all the way to the high ceiling, Wesker could have jumped up on top of them and cheated. He was not yet frustrated enough to break through them.

Yet again, his earpiece came alive. Three times. Three times in 10 minutes that Leon had contacted him. What had happened to the wary, standoffish behavior of half an hour ago? Had watching Wesker survive a lethal trap somehow lessened Leon's fear of him? Perhaps he should not have talked so much. Teasing Kennedy had been the one bright spot on a mission more irritating than the debacle in Antartica. It was like poking a desert rain frog to watch it puff up and yell. Now even that was denied to him.

"Hey, Wesker. You still in that maze?"

"Yes."

"I think I found a map for it."

"That would have been very helpful before I entered it."

"Just need to figure out where you are. Any distinguishing features nearby?"

He let the question hang in the air for a moment so its sheer stupidity could sink in.

"Walls," he said.

"Ah. Right." Leon quieted for a moment. "Have you passed the spike trap yet?"

More spikes? Wesker took his hand off the button so Leon wouldn't notice his convulsive shudder and hear the sharp inhale that came with it.

"I have not," he said, the picture of calm.

"Hmm. OK, how about the crushing ceiling?"

"No."

"The cage of..." he trailed off. "I can't tell what this is, but it's got tentacles."

" _No._ "

"The flamethrowers?"

"You wouldn't be making up traps just to put me on edge, hmm, Kennedy?"

"What? No! Who would do that?" Leon replied with such shock and immediacy that Wesker was tempted to believe him. "Wait, have you...?"

"You've gone out of your way to spring every trap I've warned you about," Wesker reminded him.

"Hey. I had my reasons," Leon protested. "If you haven't run into a single trap, then I think I know what route you must have taken. How many 4-way intersections have you passed?"

"This is ridiculous," Wesker muttered to himself. "I wasn't keeping track." The thing behind the wall snarled again. "It sounds like there's something alive and unhappy nearby."

"Hmm. OK. I think I know where you are. The path ahead of you, are there two openings nearby? One to the left, and one to the right farther down?"

"Yes."

"Take the right turn."

Wesker didn't move. Instead, he stood still and scowled, mind whirling. If the agent wanted him dead, he'd already passed up his opportunity. Yet, that was no guarantee of future behavior. Humans were fickle, irrational creatures with changeable minds, and nothing made their actions more arbitrary than ephemeral concepts like 'compassion' or 'morality.' Leon could be regretting his earlier choice, and hoping to correct his previous lapse by leading Wesker into more traps.

"You're awfully eager for me to get out of here," he said, to cover his stalling. He lowered his voice to a purr, "Missing me?"

"I, uh." Leon cleared his throat. At least one thing could still rile the agent. "Like a stake in the eye. Sooner you find that key, the sooner we can get out of here."

Wesker hummed in reply, stepping closer to examine the openings. Both looked the same, of course. Truthfully, the intent behind Leon's helpfulness was not even the major issue. The real question was whether the agent could accurately guess Wesker's location based on such sparse information.

It was a crap shoot no matter how he looked at it. Ultimately, he took the right turn, if for no other reason than to keep Leon from rubbing it in should he encounter any traps. Leon guided him with confidence, describing each turning with such detail that gradually his doubts eroded. It still came as a pleasant surprise when he set foot in the center of the maze without encountering so much as a trapdoor. A small smile tugged at his lips. The agent was proving himself quite useful.

He could see two other paths leading into the central square. One had a cage of something yellow-eyed and writhing at its distant end, the other appeared innocuous. In the center of the square stood a raised fountain. The key was there, latched to the statue of—what else—an angel that frowned sorrowfully into the basin of water.

"Does your map mention any traps around the key itself?" he asked.

"No."

Convenient. Wesker didn't trust it for a minute. He paced around the fountain, examining it from every angle for anything that looked out of place. A pinhole, for example, in which an electric eye might be hiding, or a discolored tile which could disguise a pressure plate. The water could have been poisoned with any number of substances, assuming it was even water.

He pressed a hand to his chest, noting the skin had cooled from hot coal to feverish. Caution could be left to frailer creatures. He had other ways of dealing with these situations. After lining himself up to the angel's side, he dashed across the space and then sailed over the stairs, snatching the key from its perch as he passed it. He skidded a few feet after landing, safe and sound, key in hand.

Nothing happened.

Torn between enjoying victory and paranoia, he looked over the fountain one more time. No, nothing had changed, other than the missing key. The beast had not been released from its cage, either. He snorted at himself and headed towards the opening through which he had entered. The twisted architect of this place had clearly missed an opportunity, and he wasn't about to complain.

"I have the key," he told Leon.

"Finally. Now you just have to get back out of there."

"There's that eagerness again."

"Look, I need you up here, OK? Can't open that door with only two keys."

Wesker added another tally in his head to the number of times Leon had said he 'needed him'. He would point it out once they reached around ten.

A grinding noise from the other path stopped him in his tracks. Part of the floor swung open, exposing a pit of spikes. The trap was so far away it was almost comically nonthreatening.

"That's a delayed reaction," he muttered to himself. "Unless something else...?"

A loud and panicked curse from above ripped his attention up to the ceiling, where a familiar form plummeted from a new opening. Wesker smirked to himself, crouched, and jumped upward with all his considerable strength. It was a simple matter to snatch the body out of midair and then catch on to the wall, dragging their momentum to a stop with a single hand and his feet.

"Nice of you to open a shortcut for me," he said, and twisted his head up to look through the square of golden light above. "I didn't realize you were so impatient."

"Was in the area," Leon said in a strangled voice. He let go of some gadget on his belt and seized Wesker's shoulders instead, his legs swinging freely in the open air. The position seemed to disturb him a great deal, to Wesker's amusement. He wasn't about to drop the agent. It would be wasteful to prematurely dispose of a good resource.

"Wh—how are you holding on to the wall?" Leon demanded.

"We all have our little secrets," Wesker replied.

He kicked up from wall to wall until he launched up out of the hole in the ceiling and landed neatly beside its edge. They were back on the upper floor, not far from the great hall, standing beside what had been the center of a suspiciously ornate floor panel.

"Here I thought you would know better than to trigger such an obvious trap," he said as he set Leon on his feet.

"What can I say?" Leon replied. He had that sparkle in his tone that made Wesker's eyes narrow in anticipation. "It got the drop on me."

Wesker stepped closer.

"Consider, Leon, just how wise it is to make terrible jokes when it would be so easy for me to throw you back down that pit."

"Sheesh. Grow a sense of humor, would you?"

"I have one. It does not respond to awful puns."

Leon shrugged and turned to the side, neither shameful nor worried in the least.

"Anyway. You got the key, right? Then let's get through that door and catch up to Angelus."

His earlier assessment was wrong, Wesker mused as he looked over his eager and bright-eyed companion. Leon was nothing like a desert rain frog, nor any small, shrieking animal. The man was a _goddamn puppy_. He had just needed to relax enough to show his true nature.

Wesker took the lead once more, only to be surprised when Leon fell into step beside him. When Wesker glanced his way, Leon met his eyes and shrugged, as if to say, "Yeah? So, what?" Wesker snorted and broke the stare.

The great hall seemed to echo their anticipation as they reached the barrier. Leon put his one key in the left hollow while Wesker inserted the two he'd collected at the top and right side. With a clunk, the mechanism activated, the lamprey mouth arrangement of spears retracting in neat order until the path was clear.

"How long do you think it took to engineer that?" Leon asked.

"Far more than it's worth, I'm sure," Wesker replied.

No other obstacles ambushed them as they climbed the stairs to the double doors. Leon pressed himself to the wall and signaled his readiness. Wesker showed no such caution. He grabbed hold of the door handles and hauled them open, determined the next room empty of hostiles, and waved for Leon to follow him.

Here the interior took another sharp departure in its decor. No mirror-bright tile and golden accents here, nor white marble and blue carpet. This was the oldest part of the estate, the original core around which all the additions had been built. It was built up of old, weathered limestone mixed with wood, and lit by flickering candles placed low on the walls. The dim silhouette of a second floor balcony stretched above them, crossing the upper reaches of the room too high for the poor light to reach. He could see no way to access it from the ground.

"Is it just me, or is the atmosphere in here kind of...sick?" Leon asked beside him.

"Old and rotting," Wesker agreed. A light, foul odor permeated the room, a sharper scent of decay than that of the surrounding swamp. Maybe it was the wood. He clicked on his shoulder-mounted flashlight, piercing the gloom with its strong circle of light. The ground floor held two doors, and nothing else of interest.

"You got a map of this part?" Leon asked.

"If I guess right, the castle keep should be in that direction." He indicated the left door. Wesker had no maps for any part of the castle. It was simply second nature to keep the rough location of his goal in mind at all times. He had reoriented himself anytime he passed a window, searching out the profile of the large, square keep against the night sky.

"And what do we want that's in the keep?" Leon asked, his eyes narrow. Wesker suppressed a sigh. The agent did not like taking orders from him, not unless he was given the chance to examine the situation and reach the same conclusion—a far from ideal working relationship which Wesker would not have tolerated from anyone on his payroll. He was not accustomed to explaining himself.

"The labs are most likely to be at the top," Wesker said. "I'm sure we'll both have our own business there." He caught Leon's gaze and held it, waiting for the slightest twitch to give away his thoughts. Leon's face did not betray him. The man's mission remained a mystery. Wesker could only guess it would involve Angelus's destruction and the neutralization of any viral threats within the castle.

"How do you figure?" Leon asked, his eyes turning to the door. He did not deny Wesker's last statement.

"Where else could they be? Even this architect couldn't construct a basement in a swamp. Don't you find it suspicious that Angelus installed all those anti-aircraft devices, yet left nearly no defenses on the ground?"

"I guess you have a point. Whatever he's trying to protect must be up high."

"Therefore, the central keep. It's the only place big enough."

"Alright." Leon sighed. "Left it is."

What a hassle.

A layer of sticky grime pulled at his fingers as he opened the door. Beyond lay a long, dim hall, carpeted by rotten floor rugs, adorned with crumbling tapestries, and flanked by many more suits of armor in two neat rows. Wesker smirked down at his uneasy companion, who was eyeing the decorations with grim suspicion.

"They have yet to move," Wesker said.

"Yeah," Leon replied. His expression did not change. They set off down the hall at a brisk, if cautious, pace. "You ever been to Bamburgh?"

"Can't say I have. Sounds English," Wesker said. Perhaps Leon was the type to settle his own nerves with chatter. It would explain a lot.

"It's a beautiful old castle near a sea cliff. They've got a huge collection of medieval armor and weaponry in this really bright, well-kept museum. They let school groups tour it. Duke who still lives there is very nice, real friendly. I visited when I was ten."

"Sounds like a dear childhood memory."

"The teacher had to threaten to carry me out over her shoulder," Leon agreed. "Basically, it was completely the opposite of everything here." He threw a hand out to encompass the entire hallway, his expression vexed.

"I've never understood why people romanticize castles," Wesker said. "They were only military installations, more likely to house soldiers than royalty. You can't go 100 yards in Europe without tripping over one."

"Yeah. Well, they're old. And we don't have any back home," Leon said. "Maybe 1,000 years from now, they'll write fairy tales about missile bases."

"Perhaps. Assuming humanity is still around."

"You're such a pessimist."

"If that's what you want to call it."

Metal scraped over stone behind them, loud and grating, as if someone had just pushed a heavy bookcase across the floor. Both men turned on their heels as one, guns drawn and aimed down the hall. Wesker could see nothing but shadows. He and Leon looked at each other.

"Out of curiosity, when you had your trouble before," Wesker gestured to a suit of armor, "how did you handle it?"

"There were plaga parasites inside them. The parasites _hated_ flashbang grenades."

"I see."

When no further noises came, they resumed walking at a more cautious pace. There had not been a single B.O.W. in this section so far, and Wesker knew that wouldn't last.

"I was under the impression the parasites could not live long outside a host," he said.

"That's what I thought—"

That scraping again, closer now, and still behind them. Its source had to be in the room they had just left. Leon caught his eye and jerked his chin at a door to their right. Wesker nodded.

They slipped inside, shutting the door quietly behind them. The room turned out to be a closet, one so small the two men barely fit alongside the metal shelving unit. Light splashed over their feet from under the door. They held still and listened.

Wesker felt ridiculous immediately, hiding from danger like a scared schoolgirl. Yet what choice did they have? If this creature was any hardier than a Gouger, then half a clip would not be enough to put it down. He needed to be patient and clever—two things he excelled at, as it happened—and wait for it to waddle past so he could ambush it from behind. For a man of his abilities, lack of ammo simply meant he could not be as bold as usual. All he needed was to take a page out of Leon's book and borrow some weapons from the suits of armor.

The metal scraped closer, louder, and something groaned in a hoarse, ghoul-voice. Wesker's eyes narrowed. That scraping sound—either it was dragging a weapon, or it was armored. He would need to account for either possibility.

His thoughts scattered as a cool body shoved up against his side, and silky hair brushed his nose. He wrinkled his nose to keep from sneezing. Leon had pressed up against him, either too distracted to realize what he was doing or too focused to care. That marked the second time the man had willingly touched him. The agent smelled like blood.

"It's big," Leon whispered. "And it's coming this way."

The door was not fitted well in its frame, a consequence of the uneven floor sinking. Wesker shifted so he was behind Leon, planted a hand on either side of the agent, and leaned up to peek out through the gap.

Leon's breathing stilled, and and his shoulders tensed against Wesker's chest. He must have only just realized his position. Wesker smirked, invisible in the dark, and pressed his eye to the gap. He couldn't see anything. After consideration, he pushed the sunglasses up to the top of his head and tried again.

"You're like a furnace," Leon grumbled.

"Virus," Wesker replied, for it more or less explained everything. Even when he wasn't healing, his baseline temperature was higher than regular humans. But temperature was relative. To him, everyone else felt cold.

The boom of a door bursting open silenced any further chatter. Heavy footsteps stampeded towards them, and a blur of green and gray streaked past with such speed the closet door rattled in its frame. Before Wesker could blink, the creature had hit the other end of the hall and broken through the wall with a tremendous racket of shattering wood and stone. The footsteps and the scraping faded to silence.

"I'd hate to run into that guy," Leon said.

Wesker privately agreed. Speed, strength, and size made for a tricky foe.

"He's long gone now. Shall we continue? Or..." Wesker lowered his head to purr into Leon's ear, unable to resist the opportunity, "Did you wish to stay in here a little longer? You are more attractive company than the last man I dragged into a closet."

Leon did not fidget, or stammer, or give any other delightful reaction to that tone of voice.

"You drag guys into closets a lot?" He asked, bald and disapproving, as if he were commenting on someone's smoking habit.

"It's the easiest place to slit a throat without drawing attention," Wesker replied.

To his credit, Leon did not fling himself outside immediately. Instead, he made a soft noise of disgust and straightened to his full height. The man had a bold, stubborn streak the size of the Grand Canyon. Compelling, that behavior. Wesker could hardly stop himself from playing games when Leon made it so fun. Teasing aside, Wesker didn't lie: Leon was very attractive. He had never denied that. For a long time he'd assumed it was the only reason Ada favored this man, but now he could see there was more to it.

Reluctantly, he pulled away from that train of thought. He had no interest in an unwilling partner, and Leon was still his enemy. So, he folded up the attraction and tucked it away the same way he did any distraction.

"In any case, we had better move before it comes back," Wesker said.

Leon opened the door. Outside, only half the suits of armor still stood proud, their compatriots scattered across the floor. A heap of rubble marked where the wall at the end used to be.

"Let's not go that way," Leon suggested.

"I see more doors back this way," Wesker replied.

They picked one at random, and passed through many damp, dark rooms and claustrophobic halls without event. No traps, no blockades, no puzzles, and the only B.O.W.s lay in broken heaps on the floor, motionless and half-eaten.

"The big guy's been busy," Leon observed as they passed a pile of dead Gougers.

"Perhaps he was set loose to clean up," Wesker said.

"Or he broke out."

If anything, the lack of threats only added to his unease. Their absence did nothing to ease the cloying, oppressive atmosphere of the inner castle. He didn't like it. If anything clever tried to ambush them, it would have plenty of likely spots to do it from. The quarters were close and badly lit. Wesker was not looking forward to trying to fight here.

A cry from ahead stopped them in their tracks.

"Dammit...! Why won't you listen...get out of...! Don't make me use..."

"Angelus," Leon growled. He unsheathed his combat knife.

"I'm sure he's not out of tricks yet. Stay on guard."

In the next room, they found him. Angelus stood behind a barrier of bars, the fuzzy caterpillars of his eyebrows knotted close with irritation. An elevator gleamed beside him, standing out from the old stone like a pearl in a coal heap. He was glaring at the ceiling. Wesker followed his gaze to a large, square hole in the stone, too dark to see inside. At the sound of their footsteps he glanced down at them, then did a double take.

"What? How? Impossible!" Angelus stabbed a finger at Leon. "I designed my traps specifically so you couldn't pass them alone."

"You should ask whoever built all those death traps for you to give you your money back, 'cuz they sure weren't deathly enough!"

Wesker heaved a sigh.

" _Leon._ "

"I have to warm up, OK?"

"You're always the only..." Angelus trailed off, his eyes lighting on Wesker for the first time. It took effort not to laugh at the way the man's face crumbled into fury. " _You_."

"Me," Wesker said.

"After all the trouble I went through to warn you about this snake, you're still working with him?" Angelus demanded of Leon.

"Reluctantly," Leon said.

"For now," Wesker said at the same time.

Angelus glared at Wesker.

"Of all the people for the company to send after me, that they would choose you..." His fists clenched. "I had hoped the reports were mistaken, but I see they were not. You will regret agreeing to come here, Dr. Wesker. I'll make you regret!"

"You knew they would send me from the moment you took Burnside."

"But how could I not? He is the last masterpiece of Alexia Ashford, and the company was leaving him to rot! Her work must be shown to the world, that they understand her true genius!"

"...Alexia?" Leon asked.

Wesker only just restrained a grimace. He would have clapped a hand over Leon's mouth, but it was too late. Angelus already had that mad glint erupting through his eyes.

"A Goddess of science!" the old man bellowed. "Unmatched in genius, so regal in bearing, the perfect queen this world deserved!"

"She was 10," Wesker said, in a tone of longest suffering.

"An unprecedented prodigy!" Angelus went on, undaunted. "If only we'd had her with us at Arklay instead of that maniac Birkin—"

That was enough of that. Wesker fired three times, aiming for the center of mass, yet no single bullet reached its target. A web of cracks split the air a foot past the bars, blotting out his view of Angelus's astonished face. Bulletproof glass. Damnation.

"I'm sorry, were you still talking?" Wesker asked, his gun still smoking.

Angelus had jumped backward at the first shot and thrown his arms up, apparently having forgotten about the presence of his own safety glass. He lowered his arms, sweat glistening on his brow, a manic smile flickering over his mouth.

"Ah—aha ha, yes, I forgot you were once a crony of his," Angelus said.

Leon stirred beside him, but Wesker didn't take his eyes off his target.

Though Angelus tried to recover his stride, his hands trembled. So he was not yet so far gone that he couldn't see the danger he was in.

"H-how it must have burned you," Angelus said, "to watch him destroy himself."

Angelus was an old fool and a poor manipulator. Wesker told himself firmly that he was not going to rise to the man's bait, even as the gun creaked under his grip.

"What is it that you want, Angelus?" Leon barked. "Why are you doing all of this?"

"What I want? You! DEAD!" he slammed a button on the control panel next to the elevator.

A piercing electronic wail erupted from speakers hidden in the corners. Wesker staggered, covering his ear with one hand while the other gripped his gun tightly. The noise pounded at him like physical blows, knives to his ear canals. He wasn't the only B.O.W. in the room that didn't like it; a horde of white, spidery shapes dropped down from the hole in the ceiling. They were roughly the size of bulldogs, their eight spindly limbs joined with thick webbing. Their skin had a rubbery texture, more like octopus than carapace.

"Infectors!" Wesker called. The last time he'd seen these, they had wiped out half his men. Leon had already skewered one that had leaped for his face.

Wesker had a last glimpse of Angelus cackling madly in the elevator right before its doors closed. No matter, they would catch him eventually. The Infectors were fast and small, and it took all his speed and concentration to smash them under his boots one by one. Two of them latched onto his leg and started to climb up. No sense wasting his last 3 bullets on these nuisances. He holstered his gun, seized each spider, and ripped them off. Their heads popped like bubble wrap in his hands.

A yell from Leon behind him, followed by the thud of a grown man hitting the floor. Wesker crushed one more Infector under his boot heel and then turned. Leon had managed to stab down five of the creatures, but he was not gifted with Wesker's speed. One Infector, the runt of the nest, had latched onto the agent's neck and burrowed under his shirt. He thrashed on the ground, cursing, frantically trying to knife open his own clothing to reach it.

Wesker fell hard to his knees, skidding slightly over the bloody stone. He braced one hand on the thrashing agent's shoulder, seized the collar of his shirt in the other, and tore open the shirt at the shoulder, one strap of the combat vest popping open under the force. The Infector had its finger-limbs jabbed into Leon's ribs, clinging tight as a barnacle. Wesker grabbed the thing's rubbery head, forced its proboscis away from Leon's vulnerable skin. He bent the head back farther and farther until something in it cracked.

The Infector thrashed madly in its death throes, digging its claws deep into Leon's skin. He yelped, arching off the ground. Wesker went knuckle to knuckle, twisting and snapping, breaking each and every leg in turn. With the limbs broken, it gave no resistance when he peeled off the stiffening corpse and deposited it to the side.

"Ripping my clothes off already," Leon grumbled. "Could have asked me to dinner first."

"I'm afraid even I can get impatient sometimes," Wesker replied.

"Did it break the skin?" Leon asked.

Wesker peeled up Leon's torn shirt, examining the angry red punctures with clinical eyes.

"Not with the important part," he said. "However, it's not a good idea to have open wounds in this place. Have you any medical supplies?"

"Yeah, in my pack," Leon said, jerking a thumb behind him.

Wesker unclipped the pack from Leon's waist and slid it around in front of him. There was very little in the pack—empty ammo boxes, tools for gun maintenance, a handful of fish scales, and a first aid kit. The kit had plenty of bandages, sterilizing wipes, a needle, and two full first aid sprays.

"Ex-Umbrella scientists," Leon groaned. "Always a treat."

"It is as I said. Morons, and madmen."

"So, which one were you?"

Wesker glared at him over the top of his shades, not deigning to reply. He put the needle and thread aside, deciding it was too risky to try to put in stitches here. He paid no notice to Leon's unusual silence until the man spoke again, serious now, almost hesitant in speaking.

"You knew William Birkin?"

"I did," Wesker replied, not looking up from the kit. "We were something like partners, once upon a time."

"Then, you knew him well?"

"Few knew him better," Wesker replied. The first aid spray, first. It was specially formulated to sanitize and hold wounds closed, not as well as stitches, but it would do. He pushed Leon's shirt back up, laying one palm flat over Leon's pectoral.

"Why did he do it? Why did he inject himself with G?" Leon threw out the question with the force of a bullet, urgent yet pained. Almost as if he didn't want to ask, but couldn't help himself. "He had to know what would happen. G was developed as a weapon, not a medicine. He can't have expected it would do anything but turn him into a monster. Did he want to bring the whole city down with him, even though his own family was there? His daughter?"

Wesker let the questions flow over him like water from a burst dam, quietly watching Leon's face. This must have been troubling him for years, maybe ever since the fateful night itself. Wesker hardly noticed his own hands had stilled against Leon's body.

"William never was very good at considering the consequences of his actions," he replied. "Always rushing ahead, living moment to moment, lost in his own mind. I doubt he had a thought in his head other than his own survival—and revenge."

"So he was just selfish." Leon huffed and lowered his head, eyes squeezed shut. "And 100,000 people paid for it."

He'd memorized the death toll. How sentimental of him.

Wesker liberally coated all of Leon's wounds with the first aid spray, then began taping bandages in place. It had been a long time since he'd thought about William Birkin. By necessity, he'd avoided the subject for the first couple years after the man's death. Thinking about it, and the whole sequence of things-gone-wrong that had built up into the colossal cock-up that was the Raccoon City disaster, made his vision turn red. The virus had given him a new and dangerous temper, dangerous foremost because emotional stress could have the same destabilizing effect as physical stress. He would not degrade like Alexia. He would control himself.

But he did miss William, not that he would ever admit it. He missed the man's genius at every stumbling block he encountered in his research, missed his company on late nights at the lab, missed the 3 am calls insisting he come over right now so they could follow up whatever crazy hunch William had just had.

Perhaps not that last one.

Most of all, he missed having a partner in crime. And Annette? He had never called her a friend, but she had been useful in her way, an essential buffer and stabilizer against William's darker qualities. Yet, even she had not been enough to keep her husband from his gruesome end.

"How is Sherry?" he asked, taking care to keep his tone light, curious. Leon immediately tensed anyway, his eyes slitting open. Of course, Leon would assume the worst of him. His wariness was amusing.

Sherry had always been an object of curiosity to Wesker. He'd seen the spark of genius in the child, and hoped to one day direct it along the same path as her father. Dear William had thoroughly wrecked that possibility.

"I'm not telling you where she is," Leon warned. "Sherry is...healthy."

Not well. Not happy.

"Your government has her locked in a lab, I suppose."

"Don't even try to pretend you would treat her any differently."

"Her condition requires monitoring. However, I would not be afraid to let her out of the lab once in a while."

"You're the reason they won't risk that."

Wesker chuckled.

"And you think it's better that she spend her life in a box?"

"Look, I don't like it, but it's not like they gave me a choice. They picked us up right outside Raccoon city."

Things clicked into place. Knowing what he did of the American government, it was easy to imagine how things had played out for two unfortunate survivors.

"Ahhh, so it wasn't just altruistic nobility on your part. You were threatened into taking your current job."

"I'd have done it anyway," Leon insisted. "I'd fight my own way. They just didn't give me a choice." He sighed.

"Saw too much?" Wesker guessed. "Perhaps found out something they didn't want anyone to know? You were all over Dr. Birkin's lab, after all."

Leon looked up at him, suspicious and uneasy.

"You...knew? About Dr. Birkin's plans for G?"

"That he was planning to sell it to your government, and they had been ready to buy it? Yes."

"If Raccoon City hadn't gone to hell, they'd probably be using it right now."

"Is it so surprising? Who do you think Umbrella's top client was? Most terrorists weren't rich enough to pay our prices back then. William simply decided to cut out the middle man."

Leon's fists clenched. He subsided into an angry silence. Wesker finished with the last bandage, and sat back.

"I know a thing or two about disappearing," he said. "If you wished to slip yourself and Sherry out of your shackles, I might be able to help you."

"And jump from the frying pan into the fire? No thanks. You're a bit too hot for me to handle," Leon said. When Wesker raised his eyebrows, the other man simply lifted his chin, aware and unembarrassed about his word choice.

Well, it had been worth a shot. Even if he had accepted, Leon would take a lot of tempering before he could be an effective agent. There was that pesky rebellious streak to handle, for a start, and then his even peskier morals.

Leon climbed to his feet and took his pack back from Wesker.

"Angelus?" he asked as he fastened it around his waist.

"Fled. We will need to find a way to reach that elevator."

"Great." Leon looked around at the room, barren of anything else but bars and dead Infectors. "I don't suppose you can bend those?"

Wesker seized a bar and pushed. It did not budge. The only way to the elevator, it seemed, meant finding their way to the door on the other side.

"Great," Leon repeated, nodding to himself. "Back out into Dracula's castle we go, I guess."

* * *

End Note: Cheer up, Leon. At least you and Wesker are out of the closet! 8)


	5. Shirts are Ruined and Things Heat Up

**Author's Note: Sorry this took so long, I had to rewrite a bit to keep things down to a T rating.**

 **Chapter 5: In Which Shirts are Ruined and Things Heat Up**

* * *

The grind of metal over stone reached its crescendo and then faded, scraping into the distance. Leon cracked open the wardrobe door and pressed one eye to the gap. Across the way, a lone overturned chair lay in two pieces beside a long gouge in the ancient floor. He dared to open the door a little wider, just enough to see to his left. Empty room.

He blew out the breath he'd been holding and climbed out of the wardrobe.

"Sorry about that," he said into his earpiece. "Been making friends with the closets around here."

"You seem very fond of closets. Trouble with the locals?" Wesker asked. They'd chosen to split up again in order to cover more ground, and Leon had not been having much luck on his end. He cursed to himself as he pushed open a door and saw that he'd circled back to the massive library again.

"Old Scrape-y's been past three times now. I think he's patrolling."

"Old Scrape-y," Wesker repeated, tone flat.

"So what did you need?"

"This safe requires a code to unlock. The painting nearby seems to be a hint, however..." he paused. "I am out of ideas."

Goddamn puzzles. Still, it was kind of funny how reluctant Wesker sounded to admit he was stumped.

"Can you describe it?"

"It's a pastoral piece with a group of shepherds leaning over a grave. The tombstone reads, 'Et in Arcadia ego.'"

Leon scoured his brain for all the Latin he had ever absorbed from his Irish-Catholic grandmother.

"And in paradise I am?"

"I'd say the translation is closer to: 'Even in paradise, I exist.'"

"You know Latin?"

"It's the language of science," Wesker answered dismissively. "Where do you think most chemical names derive from?"

"Even in paradise..." Leon muttered to himself. It sounded familiar. "Wonder what that's supposed to mean."

"Given its placement, I would assume it's referring to death."

"Cheery," he said. That fit Angelus's style alright, mingling horror and death with—wait. "The cherub room!"

"Pardon?"

"I saw that phrase on a plaque in that room with the cherubs. Remember? Right in front of the first trap hall? The plaque was above the door, and there were numbers written underneath it."

"I don't suppose you thought to write them down."

"I couldn't even read them."

"I'll have to do some backtracking, then. It shouldn't take me long."

"Alright. When you finish with that, could you swing my way? I need you over by the room with the brain-sucking plants."

"Do you," Wesker replied, loading the two innocent words with more dark promise than Leon thought possible. Leon swallowed down the sudden tangle in his throat. He had no idea where that came from, or why Wesker sounded so amused.

"Watch your back," Leon said, disguising his fluster with his gruffest tone. "I don't want to spend another half-hour digging spikes out of you."

Wesker cut the transmission without comment.

Somewhere along the line, Leon reflected as he waited for the flush to drain from his cheeks, their banter had started to veer out of control.

Alright, fine, so he'd started the flirting first. He'd own up to that. He'd never expected things to escalate the way they had.

Temporary partners or not, Leon could never forget that Wesker was dangerous. Let a man like that keep his footing and he'd concoct all kinds of twisty plans around you. Before you knew it, your head would be spinning so much from the manipulation that you'd do something really stupid, like work for him.

As a counter-measure, Leon had done everything he could to keep Wesker off balance. So far, bad jokes and displays of simple human decency had worked the best. Boy, did that have some depressing implications. Yet he couldn't pity Wesker—the man clearly thrived in dangerous environments.

The flirting, though. That was a mistake that just kept spiraling away from him. He had not expected Wesker to flirt in return, and especially not to spring it on him without warning. It threw Leon for a loop every time, and Wesker must have picked up on that, because he was doing it more and more.

Here were the sad, hard truths: Wesker, by some cruel and unfair joke of the universe, was an extremely handsome man with a voice that could dip low and purr in a way that melted bones. And the more he used those seductive tones, the more Leon felt the power struggle change tune. The games were morphing into something closer to genuine interest. It was a dangerous slope to plummet down, and he wasn't helping himself by contributing to the escalation.

He couldn't help it. His stubborn pride refused to back down from a challenge.

His musings were interrupted when the door opened, and the devil of his thoughts appeared in the flesh.

"What took you so long?" Leon asked.

"I apologize for the delay. I was..." Wesker hesitated, his face twisting in displeasure. "I was attacked by the cherub statues." He glared over the top of his sunglasses, daring Leon to laugh at him.

It took every ounce of professional restraint to keep his face neutral.

"I warned you."

"You did."

Now that he looked closer, he could see the light powdering of white dust over Wesker's dark clothing, coating new tears and bloodstains.

"So. What did you need me for?" Wesker asked.

Leon's brow furrowed at the baffling emphasis on 'need'. He shook it off.

"I feel like I've been wandering in circles here, and I haven't found anything but Old Scrape-y. I was thinking I'd check the second floor, if you could give me a boost." He pointed at the second story landing above them.

Wesker's irritated expression soured further.

"I am not your personal elevator," he informed Leon.

"Or, I could waste time wandering around for hours, hunting for the stairs. I thought you wanted to get this mission over with quickly. My mistake."

Wesker heaved a sigh. Just as victory seemed certain, the man's irritation faded into a smirk that made Leon question every life decision that had led to this moment.

"Very well. In the name of efficiency." Without warning, he scooped Leon up into a bridal carry. "Did you want to jump up here, or try the balcony in the front room first?" he asked, almost sweetly.

"Uh—this one's fine." Leon did his best to sound casual, as if he weren't draped over the arms of a man who could crush his skull with one hand.

Wesker took his damn sweet time lining up his angle before he launched himself upward. They landed lightly on the balcony, where the man was equally slow to put Leon down. Unlike before, Leon did not try to shove his way free as soon as it was safe. There went his pride acting up again, tramping down his common sense. Definitely just pride, and not anything else.

Look, Wesker was warm and the castle was drafty. That was all.

"Was the code worth it?" Leon asked.

"Yes. I have now secured a master key."

"Great." Leon had yet to see any locked doors in this part of the castle. He looked to the left, then to the right. Each had a door at the end. "Why don't we—"

"Split up again?" Wesker guessed. "Always so eager to slip away. You really do think of me as just an elevator."

A very deadly elevator, Leon thought, but he did not voice it. Wesker did not need the ego-stroking.

"Are we being efficient or not?" Leon asked.

Wesker flashed him a knowing smile, his eyebrows quirking gently upward. "Very well. I'll meet up with you later."

Leon kept his arms crossed and scowled at the black-clad figure's back until he disappeared through the left doorway. He definitely did not shiver, nor swallow.

This was really getting out of hand.

As he followed the snaking path along the connected second floor balconies, Leon had a bird's eye view of all the destruction his large friend had done to the floors and furniture. Speaking of, a muffled roar and a crash broke the silence, seeping through several walls to reach him. It had come from Wesker's direction. Leon hesitated for a moment, waiting for a call on his earpiece. When none came, he shrugged, and continued on his way. Wesker could handle himself.

The second floor proved more of the same, with nothing of great interest, until his path ended at a narrow staircase with deep wooden steps. 'Staircase' may have been too generous a word. It looked like a gopher tunnel that someone had nailed steps inside. It wasn't just the size of it that kept Leon from heading down. After all the trouble he'd gone through to make Wesker carry him up here, it seemed a waste to return downstairs empty-handed.

"Hey, Wesker. Anything interesting on you half of the floor?"

"No," Wesker replied. The voice did not come from his earpiece. It came from behind him.

Leon nearly jumped head-first down the stairs. He whirled, wedging himself into a corner, wide eyes fixed on the man standing casually in the middle of the walkway.

"How the hell did you get there?" he asked.

Wesker raised an eyebrow.

"The same way as you, I imagine. The other direction hit a dead end, so I doubled back."

"And decided not to say anything about it. Jesus." Leon massaged the back of his shoulder where he'd clipped it on the corner of the wall. He willed for his pounding heart to slow down. "You're damn quiet when you want to be." And wasn't that terrifying.

"I apologize if I startled you." Wesker grinned, looking about as apologetic as a fox in a hen house. "Shall we head down? If my mental map is accurate, this should lead to a new area."

Leon glanced at the stairs. No way could two men fit down it side by side.

"Looks dangerous. You go first."

Wesker snorted.

"I doubt we will encounter any snakes," he said, and climbed down into the dark staircase.

The only snake around, Leon thought darkly, was the one in sunglasses pushing ahead of him.

They descended. It was dark and cramped and miserable. It felt like a small eternity before they emerged, blinking, at the bottom. Leon grimaced and brushed several spiders off his hair.

"More wood than stone here," Wesker observed. "I wonder if they were running out of materials."

"Someone hasn't maintained it very well," Leon said. Patches of rot and splintery fractures littered the floor boards. The wall across from them was solid stone, yet the floor and opposite wall were wood.

"The elevator should be...that way." Wesker pointed diagonally to his left, through the wall.

"How do you do that?" Leon asked.

"I pay attention," Wesker replied.

A minute's walk brought them to a double door, an old imposing thing of wood, like you'd expect from the entrance to a gloomy old castle. Maybe it had been at one point. Leon gave it a wary look.

"Another of your little foibles?" Wesker asked.

"A new one," Leon said. "Big doors in this castle always lead to trouble."

Wesker hummed his agreement.

"We've reached the end of the hall. There's not much choice, unless you want to move further from our goal," he said, and reached out to tug at the doors. They didn't budge. "Ah." He took a large black key from his pocket and unlocked the doors. They swung inward with a loud creak.

The room within was huge, another two-story deal with a cathedral ceiling. That didn't make Leon like it any better. Two large chandeliers hung from above, only half their candles lit. A barred door stood at the other end, beside a large mural of an angel with wings of fire. A plush red carpet dominated the central floor space, clean and new as if it had been ripped fresh from some millionaire's bedroom.

"Don't let those doors close all the way," Wesker barked.

Leon grabbed a stray rock from the ground and wedged it between the doors.

"You getting as bad a feeling as I am?" he asked.

"Caution would not go amiss," Wesker replied. He frowned, knocking his heel against the floor. "This has been remodeled. And reinforced."

"Think it used to be wood?"

"I've no doubt."

A click came from the doors behind Leon.

"They just tried to lock," he said.

"That's what I was afraid of," Wesker said. His eyes were fixed across the room, on the mural. The stone had split down the middle, and each side was slowly grinding apart. Leon slipped his knife from its sheathe.

In the dark space revealed behind the mural, a human-shaped shadow watched them with glittering yellow eyes. It came forward into the light with slow, ponderous steps.

It had been human, once. What was left of the face was soft-featured, almost cute, in a 1950s pin-up kind of way. Between the cherubic face and the fact any dangly bits had rotted off, its gender was a toss-up. Cords of gray-green growth protruded from the left temple and eye socket, coiling all around the head and neck. Their texture reminded Leon of the giant mutant plant back in Raccoon's lab.

The bones of its shoulders had exploded outward from violent growth, the splintered ends jutting at odd angles. In place of arms, two whipcord tentacles hung from the mass of those bony spikes, each so long they dragged on the floor, and crusted over with green flesh.

"Ah, so that's where that went," Wesker said. He also took a step back, which Leon took as a very bad sign.

"What is it?"

"The MJ-03, my employer's answer to Umbrella's Tyrants. It was created using the T-Veronica virus."

"Veronica?" Leon repeated in a half-snarl. The last he had seen that virus had been back in South America, when Javier Hidalgo had used it to turn himself into a giant Audrey II.

The creature, MJ-03, raised its whip arms straight up in the air. Leon watched in bafflement as the claws at the end of those tentacles bent inwards, the creature impaled itself. Rivers of blood gushed down the long arms, coating them in red. He observed this with his mouth falling open until the pieces clicked into place.

"Oh, shit."

The blood ignited into two thin pillars of fire that wavered in the air above the B.O.W. Firelight danced over the slimy growths of its head, threw flickering shadows over the cherub face and reduced the golden eyes to yellow pinpricks. MJ-03 threw its head back and screamed.

With a twist of the shoulder, one coiling whip of fire snapped towards his face. Leon jumped to the side, a wave of heat crashing over him as the flaming tentacle cracked just behind him. The acrid stink of burnt flesh made him want to retch. He rolled up into a crouch, knife at the ready. A combat knife and one bullet left to him, and they were up against something that was supposed to rival a tyrant. His day just kept getting better and better.

"Code name: fire dancer," Wesker said, tone far too calm for the situation. He had dodged at the same time, and ended up on the opposite side of the room with the B.O.W. between them. The MJ-03 screamed again, and threw another flaming arm after Leon.

"That's great," Leon gasped out between dodging streaks of fire. "So how do we kill it?"

"The project was halted because she proved too brittle," Wesker replied. "She needs to keep a delicate balance between burning her flesh off and growing more. It constantly taxes her regenerative abilities. Collecting broken, abandoned failures seems to play to Angelus's psychosis." He said this last in a scoffing undertone. Leon wasn't sure what he was talking about.

At the sound of Wesker's voice, the fire dancer switched targets and came after him. Leon took the opportunity to catch his breath. He could see where her nickname came from. If they weren't in danger of horrible, painful death, the sight of the burning whips coiling and streaking through the air would have been a fantastic show. Wesker blurred out of the way of every strike, his inhuman speed more than a match for the B.O.W.

"We just gotta tip that balance, then," Leon said. "I don't think I have enough ammo for that."

"Nor do I," Wesker confessed.

So they had no ammo. That was fine, Leon knew how to deal with monsters in this place by now. He ran to the big double doors and pulled one in, only to freeze upon seeing the hallway. Wood. The entire interior of the old, inner castle was paneled with wood. He let the door go.

"Wesker, we can't let it leave this room! The castle'll go up like a matchstick!"

"Goddammit," Wesker hissed. He neatly dodged another strike, but didn't pay enough attention to the material under his boots until the carpet caught fire. Tongues of flame licked up his pants cuffs, startling a yelp out of him. The distraction cost him. The next whip to come singing forward caught his arm and wound around it, seizing hard and spilling fire on to his sleeve. Wesker screamed.

Leon didn't stop to think, he just aimed his knife and threw. Claire's knife-throwing lessons hadn't failed him yet. The blade neatly sliced through the tentacle, severing half of it and freeing Wesker. The older man dashed away and rolled on the floor to smother the fire. Leon didn't have time to check on his condition.

The fire dancer had staggered back, screaming, blood raining from its severed limb and painting a crescent trail of fire along the floor around her. Leon ran around her to collect his knife from the ground. Those arms really were fragile. If he could just get the second one, they'd have a much better chance.

"Please tell me you have grenades or something," he called. "I can 'disarm' her, but it won't put her down!"

"This is no time for puns, Leon," Wesker snapped. He sounded like he'd swallowed a ton of gravel, but at least he was standing.

"It's always time for—shit!" Leon ducked and rolled under a whip of fire. MJ-03 had recovered, and she was pissed. In his panic he didn't pay attention to the direction of his roll, and wound up right next to the B.O.W. She kicked him smack in the chest, a blow that hit like a sledgehammer and sent him sailing clear out of range of her own tentacles. He hit the floor on his back and skidded to a painful halt.

Above him, the chandeliers hung like gothic Christmas ornaments, their feeble light nothing compared to the fire storm below them. Leon gasped air back into his chest with the force of revelation.

"Wesker!" he choked out, forcing his aching body to sit up. "The chandeliers!"

Wesker looked up, and then gave a sharp nod. In a blink, the man was standing over him. His hand fisted in Leon's shirt and dragged him to his feet.

"Uh—wait a minute, can't you jump—?" before Leon could finish, Wesker had thrown him up onto the nearest chandelier. He scrambled to catch hold of a beam before he could fall back down. The cast iron frame was a lot more massive in person, held by a single rope about as thick as his wrist. Leon climbed up to the rope and started to saw away.

He kept one eye on the battle below as he worked. Wesker had recovered from his misstep of earlier and now ran literal circles around the B.O.W., dodging and weaving around the fire with expert skill. He moved so fast Leon couldn't track his movements half the time. No wonder Chris had been so shaken coming back from Antarctica.

The rope was nearly broken. Leon eyed the gap between the chandeliers, and dismissed the idea of jumping over. He'd only get one shot at this.

"Now!" He yelled.

Wesker dashed forward and socked MJ-03 hard enough to push her backwards, directly in the path of the chandelier. Leon jumped onto the rope moments before the final strand snapped and the whole mass of metal dropped from beneath his feet. It crashed down on the fire dancer's head with a horrible racket, punctuated by her anguished shrieks. A wave of heat buffeted his toes as more of her blood spilled and ignited. He hung tight to the rope, focused on the old fibers under his hands, not daring to look down into the plume of red and yellow below. He hoped the impact had done its job.

A flash of black landed on the other chandelier.

"Need a lift?" Wesker asked.

"Rope climbing drills were a long time ago!" Leon grit out.

The figure flashed toward him, collided with his side and wrapped him in solid arms. The rope burned his palms as he was snatched from it before he could let go, and they sailed safely to the floor. Wesker landed in a crouch.

"I thought you said you weren't my personal elevator."

"I can put you back up there if you prefer."

Leon pushed himself upright with a snort, and craned his neck for a look at the wreckage. He could see a foot and part of a tentacle twitching out from the flames.

"She may not be dead, but she won't follow us," Wesker said. "We should hurry."

The barred door needed a jewel set in its slot, which they found at the back of the dark cell where MJ-03 had been housed. Once through the door, they didn't stop running until they'd reached stone halls again.

Leon collapsed against the nearest wall and gasped for breath. Wesker did nothing so undignified, though he sagged, his head tilting towards his arm.

"We work pretty well together," Leon said.

Wesker looked up from his arm, eyebrow raising.

"In a pinch," he drolly agreed.

It was the first real good look Leon had gotten at him since MJ-03 had shown up. The fire had hit bad, leaving a blistered lacework of 3rd degree burns over his arm and shoulder. Even several minutes of his advanced healing hadn't knit the skin. Maybe burns took longer to regenerate.

Wesker pressed his hand to the burned shoulder, as if he hoped to hide the entirety of the red, melted skin with one palm. His lip curled in a light sneer, daring Leon to say anything. But Leon's stare was drawn away from the vulnerability. Wesker's shirt, if it could still hold the title, had been reduced to a single sleeve and just enough of the side and back panel to still button at the bottom. All the bared flesh was. Distracting.

"Good job, Captain Kirk."

Just like that, the other man's tension deflated into amusement. Leon would take an amused tyrant over a pissed one any day.

"Hmph. You're halfway there yourself," Wesker replied, eyeing Leon's bare shoulder.

"That's your fault," Leon said. Then he realized how that sounded, and turned his face aside to hide his flush.

"Very well, so we've each done our share of tearing off each other's clothing." Wesker smirked.

It was criminal, that smirk, Leon decided. A smirk was supposed to make him want to punch whatever smug bastard was flashing it at him, not to finish the job the fire had started on his clothing.

"Hey, I didn't do any tearing."

"This time. Nice throw, by the way. Do they teach that in basic training these days?"

"Nah. Friend taught me." Leon decided it was best not to mention any Redfields by name if he wanted things to stay civil.

God, what would Claire say if she saw Leon now? Or, even worse, Chris? Working with Wesker was bad enough. If they witnessed the way Leon's eyes kept sliding back to Wesker's bare chest like iron fillings to a magnet, or the thick way he swallowed as he watched the shadows play over the sculpted musculature, they would never let him hear the end of it. The flirting alone would give Redfield an aneurysm. Chris gave him enough grief over Ada, and he didn't even know any details about her.

Leon told himself to stop thinking about it.

"Let's find a spot to rest for a while," he suggested, "before we have to tangle with any more freaks."

* * *

About four turnings away from their coveted goal, Wesker arranged a green blanket over a chair he had placed in the center of the corridor, while Leon loitered off to the side with an armful of stolen décor and pretended not to be mortified.

Wesker had caught him staring.

Could anyone blame him? Maybe Chris. And Claire. And Jill. And...alright, a lot of people could blame him. None of those people were here now, having to stand and watch while a half-naked Wesker repeatedly bent over in front of them. If he didn't know any better, he'd say the man was doing it on purpose, the show-off. The smirk certainly hadn't left his face since he'd turned around and noticed the direction of Leon's gaze.

Presently he finished his task and fell back next to Leon, arms crossed over his chest. The burned arm had healed from a mottled, angry red to irritated pink, to Leon's quiet envy. The last time he'd gotten a bad burn it had taken three weeks to heal, and he'd lost two fingerprints on his left hand.

"You really think this will work?" Wesker asked.

They surveyed the trail they'd built from torn bits of carpet, tapestries, curtains, and stacks of old books all carefully spaced at intervals along the long hall. Earlier, they'd found the path to the elevator. Unfortunately, so had Old Scrape-y. Neither of them had been eager for another unarmed fight, so the two men had fled, stumbling only by blind luck on a shortcut that opened back to the front of the keep.

The BOW hadn't left the area since. Not content to hide and wait, they had decided to lure it out of the way with the only things Leon had seen attract it.

"No idea," Leon answered. "But I swear it went out of its way to destroy every green thing it saw."

"Such an odd behavior," Wesker said.

"Maybe the Grinch killed its mother."

Wesker's eyes rolled.

"More likely it has poor eyesight and a dislike for other T-Veronica specimens."

"You think it's got T-Veronica?"

"You described it as green, with yellow lesions and engorged veins."

Leon nodded.

"It's T-Veronica."

"Glad to have an expert on hand."

They moved to the next room. Wesker picked up one of the suits of armor from the hall, stand and all, and moved it to the center of the room. The thing must have weighed close to a hundred pounds, and he hauled it around like a paper doll. Leon swallowed. Definitely showing off, the vain jerk.

Wesker's smirk turned coy as he came close and selected a scrap of emerald cloth from the dwindling heap in Leon's arms. Leon glared at him until he left to drape the cloth over the suit of armor.

"Are B.O.W.s usually territorial?" Leon asked, averting his eyes from the lean, powerful muscles working in the man's back. The scraps of Wesker's scorched shirt dangled from his frame, covering about as much as an opera glove.

"Depends on how much intelligence they have left. The smarter ones tend to be."

Wesker checked over his work with a hand on his hip, nodded, and then gestured for Leon to follow him to the next room.

Now that the comparison was in his head, Leon couldn't stop thinking about it. Wesker and Ada really were alike, more so than he wanted to admit. They were both mysterious, dangerous, competent, and happy to use his frankly horrible taste in women (and men) against him. As much as he wanted to give Ada the benefit of the doubt, he knew she could be just as cutthroat as anyone else in the bioweapon business.

He knew this. He just...couldn't let her go.

"If you'd just screwed her back in Raccoon, maybe you wouldn't still be mooning over her," Chris had told him one night after a few too many whiskey sours.

"When was I supposed to do that? While we were running for our lives?" Leon had snapped back. He'd had a few himself then, more than was sensible, less than a usual night for Chris.

"You could have found a safe room. There's always a safe room. Done it real quick and dirty, just, scratch the itch, you know? Then maybe you could get over it." He'd taken another swig and then wrinkled his nose. "Have you ever slept with her? I'll bet that's your problem, right there."

Leon had resolved not to go drinking with Chris anymore after that. Not because of what he said, but the number of bars he had gotten them banned from. Chris was a mean drunk.

Wesker would never become another Ada, he told himself firmly. Ada was different. What they'd been through together, the way they understood each other, it could never be copied. No, Leon knew that just "screwing her" couldn't clear up the muddle of feelings between them. He didn't expect Chris to understand that.

"You've wandered off somewhere." The cool voice disrupted his thoughts, just as warm fingers grazed his arm and silk slid out from under his elbow. Wesker raised an eyebrow, his mouth softened from a smirk to a more neutral line. "Dangerous thing to do in a place like this."

"Haven't been attacked by a zombie in a while," Leon replied, shrugging a shoulder. He opened his mouth, a question about Ada's well being on the tip of his tongue, then thought better of it. Even if Wesker already suspected how close they were, Leon shouldn't give him any more evidence. "Don't worry. I'm watching your back."

"I noticed." A single, artful quirk of his smile, and he turned away, cloth in hand. Leon glared at the ceiling and willed his flush to die down.

Would Wesker ever get tired of teasing him, or was this going to be their new normal? He had a sudden vision of a future where Wesker left him notes signed with lipstick, and experienced a brief, catastrophic mental shutdown. No, no, enough of this coy bullshit. He got enough teasing from the other amoral opportunist in his life. For just this once, he was going to take Chris Redfield's advice. Just, not with the person it had been intended for.

"Okay. You know what? I'm tired of all this dancing around," Leon said.

Wesker twisted to look at him, hands suspended on the cloth hung over the wardrobe door. At the sight of Leon's face, he let his arms fall. Leon braced himself. Now or never.

"Look, I'm..." He took a deep breath. "I'm not very good at this kind of thing, so, I'm just going to come out and say it. The only way I know how." He dropped the last chunk of tapestry on the floor, cocked both hands into finger guns and trained them on Wesker. "Hey baby. Can you help me with my science assignment? I need to know how to get to Uranus."

Wesker stared at him, one incredulous eye peeking out from the top of black plastic, mouth a hard and neutral slash. For a long moment he didn't say anything. The blank reaction probably should have deflated Leon's spirit, but honestly, the look on the other man's face alone was worth it. If Wesker decided this was the last straw, and shot Leon right then and there, Leon felt he'd be going out on a high note.

After a few beats, Wesker closed the distance between them. His head tilted to one side.

"Do you have any lines that are a little cheesier? I don't yet have gouda leaking out of my ears."

The corner of Leon's lip quivered upwards.

"Give me a minute and I'll come up with one about your sunglasses."

"Leon," Wesker drawled his name with just a hint of warning. Before Leon could fire back, Wesker's hand hooked Leon's shirt and reeled him in. A hot mouth sealed over his own, scattered every nervous thought from his head. They hung in that moment, suspended, lips crushed together without moving. Leon was waiting for the other man to shove away, to pull a knife, to do anything to end this bad idea before it gained steam. He imagined Wesker was doing the same.

Then Leon dared to slide his hands up Wesker's back, and Wesker's mouth opened against his, and it was like a dam breaking. Leon seized those broad shoulders and pressed forward, fighting to dominate the kiss. Wesker was having none of it. He wrapped one solid arm around Leon's waist and dipped the agent backward with that irresistible strength. Leon flailed a little inside at being forced, literally, off-balance. His short nails dug half-moons into Wesker's skin before he retaliated by thrusting his fingers into Wesker's immaculate, gel-stiff hair, earning a grunt of irritation as he mussed it up. Wesker smelled like smoke, sweat, and blood, and he kissed deep, alternating slow sweeps of his tongue with sharp nips from his teeth.

Something growled in the distance, followed by a racket of metal crashing to the ground.

Their heads whipped up, Leon still dangling at a 45 degree angle to the floor. The open door showed only empty hall, a draft stirring a tapestry.

"We shouldn't do this in the open," Wesker said. From this angle, Leon could see the wide red eyes behind his shades, their glow adding to the ruddy flush on his cheekbones. He sounded breathless, his normally cool demeanor ruffled, lips swollen and bits of his hair sticking up in the back from Leon's attentions. Leon had never wanted anyone so badly in his life.

"Right. Yeah. C'mon, this way," Leon said. Before he could second-guess himself, he surged up out of Wesker's hold, grabbed the man's wrist, and pulled him out the other door.

Okay. So this was happening. He was dragging Albert Wesker, backstabber extraordinaire and known bioterrorist, along like a groom in one of those stupid "follow me" engagement photos towards that closet they had hidden in earlier. This decision promised great future regret, but for the moment, all he felt was a heady, high wire anticipation, made all the sharper by the potential threat of a zombie around any corner.

They stumbled into the closet, and the door shut behind them with a decisive slam.

* * *

A short distance away, one massive green hand slammed into the chest of a suit of armor, knocking it into the wall. The owner of the hand glowered down at the spill of metal and emerald cloth, then toed it a bit, just to make sure it was, in fact, cloth, and not a rival. Satisfied, the large B.O.W. raised its head and squinted at its surroundings through a fall of auburn hair. Just a moment ago it had heard that familiar voice again, the one it had been following ever since it came to these stone halls, yet had never caught up to.

Through an open door, it glimpsed a mound of green. Just the sight of the color sent its hackles up. The B.O.W.'s last clear memory before it had woken up in this drafty castle was of a thick green worm impaling its stomach, followed by pain and cold and darkness. The thing it saw now might have been another worm. A flat one, long and shimmering, coiled around the door of a wardrobe. It was hard for the BOW to tell with its poor eyesight, but it would take no chances. It charged forward with a bellow, hoisted its axe up high, and brought the heavy weapon crashing down on top of the green mound.

The wardrobe collapsed in a cloud of splinters and dust. The green fell into a heap, only cloth, no sign of a worm of any kind. The B.O.W. snorted, then went on its way, axe dragging along the floor behind it. It recognized this hall, dimly. It had been through here a few times, smashed anything green, made it safe.

Presently, it heard a soft thud from behind one of the passing doors, followed by a rustle of clothing. It paused, sizing up the door before it. Small. Wooden. Easily smashed, were it so inclined. Its nostrils flared. There was a faint smell in the air, as familiar as that voice from before. The B.O.W. leaned closer to the door. The rustling and thumping had stopped, yet it was certain there had to be something in there, hidden behind the flimsy barrier.

Then it was distracted by a flutter of movement out of the corner of its eye. At the other end of the hall, past the ruin of a smashed wall, it saw a black-charred thing stagger out of sight. Human-shaped with long arms, shorter than the B.O.W., and much more slender. Most of the flesh had been burned, but the healthy skin growing back at the edges...had been green.

The B.O.W. bared its teeth, and charged.

* * *

Inside the closet, Leon thunked his head back against the wall and contemplated the ceiling.

"I can't believe we just did that," he said.

"You started it," Wesker pointed out.

"Yeah, I guess I did. God, what is wrong with me." Leon scrubbed a hand over his eyes. The heat of the moment had passed, leaving cold regret in its wake. He was supposed to be taking down an international threat, not fraternizing with the enemy.

"I am not the person to ask," Wesker replied, amused.

"I guess not."

A warm, gloved hand cupped his face, drawing his eyes back down to Wesker's face.

"Men or women," Wesker mused, "I prefer edges."

Leon puffed a laugh against Wesker's thumb.

"People you can cut yourself on," he agreed. Chris was right. His taste in partners really was horrible.

"If that's how you want to put it."

Wesker drew away.

"That beast passed us," he said. "Which means that if we hurry, our way to the elevator is clear."

"Right. Mission to finish." Leon pushed off the wall and straightened his clothing as best he could.

Wesker gave him another of those intent stares, his eyes bright. "Stay sharp," he said, and left the closet.

* * *

A/N: Please envision Wesker covered in cherub statues, making a :( face.

If you're of age and you want to know what happened inside that closet, hop on over to Archive of our Own for the full, uncensored version. Otherwise, stay here and feel a little smug because you got a tiny extra scene from a B.O.W.'s point of view.


	6. And Angels Lose Their Way

**Chapter 6: And Angels Lose Their Way**

* * *

No matter how much he told himself to expect the unexpected, Leon S. Kennedy remained a ball of surprises. Wesker mused about this as he leaned against the wall of the elevator, waiting for it to complete its slow climb up the tower. Very forward-thinking of Angelus to have a lift installed. All those stairs must have been killing his aging knees.

Leon stood in the corner near the control panel, looking delightfully rumpled and shaken with three bright red hickies blooming down the side of his neck. He didn't appear to realize they were there. His eyes darted around in a cycle, from ceiling, to floor, to a very quick and covert look at Wesker himself, each glance wary.

Leon clearly entertained no illusions about the status of their relationship. They'd enjoyed themselves, and Leon still had the flushed glow of someone basking in endorphins, yet he had no trouble putting his guard back up immediately after playtime. A trait Wesker could respect.

Leon had every right to be cautious about their surroundings, as well. Such an enclosed space was an awful place to be ambushed, and an elevator car made for a poor shield against a B.O.W.s claws.

Wesker rolled his shoulders and ran a hand through his hair, sneering when strands of it fell right back into his eyes. It was hopeless. No amount of smoothing could tame his hair back into its usual style at this point, not without hair gel. He caught Leon smirking out of the corner of his eye. The man quickly turned his head away, no doubt to share an impish grin with the control panel. Wesker glared at the back of his head. If he'd been thinking more clearly, he would have grabbed the agent's wrists the minute Leon's fingers brushed Wesker's head. He _hated_ when people touched his hair. Damn Leon for being so distracting.

Not that he had any complaints about the culmination of that distraction. Their tryst in the closet had done wonders to relieve the irritation knotted inside him. He felt clearer now, ready to wreck Angelus's day and run off with the spoils. Yet where one breed of tension between the agent and himself had been dispelled, another took its place.

The labs lay ahead, and there, their goals diverged. Wesker intended to retrieve the stolen research, collect whatever viable specimens he could find, and kill Angelus. Leon would no doubt wish to burn the whole lab, destroy any and all specimens, and take Angelus alive for questioning. H.C.F. could not afford for the rogue scientist to fall into anyone else's hands.

Which left Leon shifting from the 'asset' column to the 'liability' one.

Part of him was almost sad. Leon had proven a competent and entertaining partner-both rare qualities. It seemed wasteful to kill him. He would wait, see how the lab was laid out, make sure he didn't need the other man before disposing of him. There was no rush, after all. Leon had no backup, no ammo, and no means of escape. Even he couldn't be too great of a menace in such a position.

The elevator began to slow. Leon took up station beside him, eyes narrowed in concentration, hand on the hilt of his knife. A soft chime broke the silence, and the doors split open. Just as Wesker had predicted, the poured concrete and stainless steel of a laboratory stood awaiting them. A thick pool of blood streaked over the floor right in front of the elevator.

"I guess we won't be finding Rapunzel up here," Leon said.

"Unlikely," Wesker agreed.

They left the enclosure of the elevator, stamping prints of their boots into the tacky blood. It couldn't have been more than a few hours old. There were no hostiles anywhere that he could see.

"I had an idea," Leon said. "If we can get to the top of the keep, then we should be able to disable his anti-aircraft guns."

"Hmm. Not a bad thought." His employers would have a much easier time transporting specimens and mopping up if they had air access. Leon no doubt wanted to enable his own extraction. It could benefit both of them, and the only one to lose out would be Angelus. "The elevator goes no higher," Wesker observed. "We'll have to find the stairs."

They set off, together. Neither man even suggested splitting up. Wesker wanted to keep an eye on Leon, and he was sure the other man felt the same. The labs were standard fare, perhaps crammed a little awkwardly into the existing space of the castle keep. It made for some strangely shaped rooms. Between the modern décor and the high tech equipment, it was easy to forget they were still inside a castle. Many of the specimen tanks lay broken and empty, their broken glass glittering upon the laboratory floors. Wesker took a particular interest in the computers they passed, checking for a functional one that might have data on it. Most had been either smashed or disconnected.

"If I had a nickle for every trashed lab I had to walk through," Leon grumbled.

"You should have more than that, or else your employers owe you a pay raise."

Leon snorted.

"Just once, I'd like to visit a lab before all hell breaks loose, that's all," he said.

"It seems hell was deliberately unleashed." Wesker tapped a console next to a cluster of tanks. "Their stasis was disrupted from here."

"So Angelus let his pets out of their cages to play. Where did they all go?"

A fair question. They had yet to see a single B.O.W., aside from the few still sleeping in their tanks.

"They must have made their way downstairs."

"I didn't know zombies could work an elevator."

"That is a recent edition. The original builders didn't have elevators. There must be stairs somewhere."

Wesker unbent from examining a console, only to notice Leon flipping through a small notebook.

"What is that?"

"Hm? Oh. Butler's diary," Leon responded.

Wesker took a second to process this. First, that Angelus had bothered to keep a butler. Second, that the butler in question had both written a diary and left it inside an ethically questionable laboratory for anyone to peruse. Third, that Leon was bothering to read it.

"What are you hoping to find?"

"Um?" Leon looked up, his eyes wide and blank. "Nothing, really. It's here, so I thought I'd look through it." He went back to flipping pages. "People see things, you know. Sometimes their insights come in handy."

Wesker sidled over to read a page over Leon's shoulder. It contained a lot of fretting about Angelus's mental health, along with some idle curiosity over adjustments made to the fire sprinklers within the labs. He didn't think he'd ever understand some of Leon's foibles.

As they continued their exploration, the man read every loose document he happened across, from the most technical of research reports to short memos requesting supply orders. Wesker left him to it. He was preoccupied with examining the remaining specimens, and determining the amount of damage Angelus had done to them. One Bandersnatch had a sopping mess of feathers protruding from its enlarged shoulder.

"Of course he put wings on it," Wesker grumbled under his breath, sneering with disgust. They hadn't even been grafted properly. He could see the staples.

"What is this guy's deal, anyway?" Leon asked.

"I don't know. His parents had the poor taste to name him 'Angelus', and things must have spiraled out from there."

"...huh."

There was a weight in that grunt, of words bitten back. Leon was frowning hard at the documents in his hand, a furrow between his brows.

"Something the matter?"

"I'm no scientist," he said. "But from these notes, it looks like Angelus was trying to cure the virus. You see here? He's going on and on about reversing the mutations."

Wesker came to Leon's side and read over the passage he indicated.

 _"The initial P-Theta experiments have been so disastrous I am afraid to try anything else on her, lest I make things worse. Too much of her cells have been altered by the virus. Killing it off now will fatally disrupt her entire system, like a poison._  
 _For now I will test my efforts on the 'Original' subject. The mission report indicates he was able to reverse his mutations shortly before his first 'death.' If I could only find the mechanism behind this transformation, and learn how to trigger it..."_

"It does sound as if there was someone he was trying to save. A 'she'. Perhaps..." Wesker trailed off. "No, he couldn't have retrieved her body. Alexia was all but disintegrated in the blasts. Is there a time stamp anywhere on this?"

Leon peeled back a few pages to show him.

"About three months ago."

"Well. Even if he did make it up to Antarctica, her remains would be a frozen, rotten mess by now."

"I don't get it. Why would he threaten anyone with a virus he was trying to cure?" Leon asked.

"Encouragement, perhaps, so others would also work on curing it. I cannot pretend to know his mind."

Leon set the documents down, his boyish features troubled. It aged him, that look. In that moment, Wesker could believe this man had seen and survived all the things in his file.

"We should keep moving," he said, and Leon nodded.

Next they came across a combat testing chamber. The cages that would have held waiting specimens stood open and empty, the observation glass splattered all over with blood. Angelus stood behind the glass, typing on something out of sight. He raised his head and glowered at them through the red smears.

"I knew it was only a matter of time before you made it this far. I'm surprised _you're_ still alive," he directed this last at Leon.

"I get that a lot," Leon said.

"Small wonder, with the company you keep. No matter. You will not spoil things this time." His eyes were on Wesker now, burning with bitter hatred. "Nothing will stop me from enacting Alexia's final will upon the world."

"Alexia's will?" Leon echoed.

"She didn't have one. She was a child. All she wanted was to play games." Wesker discretely sized up the room from behind the mask of his sunglasses. The observation room wouldn't be reachable from in here, and if the glass were up to code then it would be built to withstand strong impacts. He considered trying to break through anyway.

"Oh, but she did! One more intricate than you could comprehend!" Angelus narrowed his eyes. "I used to think you were brilliant, Dr. Wesker, but it has become clear to me that you are just as narrow-minded as all the others. To think that you would cut Alexia down in her prime, out of sheer petty jealousy for your dead friend!"

"Is that the story you've built in your head? I merely wanted a look at her work, and she proved uncooperative. Such a spoiled child, to the very end."

"My Alexia was certainly _not_ spoiled! She worked so hard to get where she was, she sacrificed so much, and who appreciates it?" He slammed his open palms down. "Nobody! She was all but forgotten!"

The words were startling in their delusion. Alexia, a hard worker? Were they talking about the same person? She had coasted through life on whim and genius, a combination of family name and wealth opening every door she could ever hope to cross. He doubted she had ever heard the word 'no,' even as a baby.

"But I haven't forgotten. And soon, the rest of the world—" Angelus cut himself off mid-speech, his eyes arrested on Leon's neck. "Wait a minute. Did you?" He gestured towards his throat.

The look on Leon's face when the pieces snapped together was absolutely priceless. He slapped a hand over the bite marks lining his neck, as if that would do any good now that they'd already been spotted.

"I-I, um," he sputtered.

"In the middle of my castle? Surrounded by zombies? With _him_?" Angelus stabbed a finger at Wesker. "Are you _insane_?"

Leon appeared flummoxed at being asked this question by a man who stapled wings to mutants and kept them as pets.

"This isn't about me," he insisted. "It's about you coming to your senses and stopping all of this. My government is willing to—"

"And after I warned you about him! He would experiment on his own mother for science, if he had one, and you went and..." Angelus shook his head. "Unbelievable."

"Agent Kennedy does have quite the rebellious streak," Wesker cut in, a smirk on his lips. "Advise him to do one thing and he'll go to the opposite extreme."

Leon had turned a fetching shade of red by this point. The bold agent looked like he wanted nothing more than to melt into the floor. Naturally, Wesker slipped his spy camera from his pocket and discretely captured the moment on film. Ada would be certain to appreciate it.

"I, no, just. Listen. We've seen your files. You were trying to cure someone, weren't you? Just come with me and, and we can help you. We have whole programs dedicated to stopping these viruses."

The air shifted, as if suddenly filled with ice, and the mad spark in Angelus's eyes went out. Here, Leon had finally found the magic words to shift the subject from himself, and the result was not comforting. Angelus lowered his head, shoulders shaking with broken, stutter-stop laughter.

"It can't be done. Everything I tried, all the work I've done, nothing but failure. She's beyond hope. Gone, and forgotten, and there was no _point_ in any of it!" He pounded a fist against the glass. "They were right. All of them, they were right. This world is a hell of our own making. But I'm going to fill it with angels. It's what she would have wanted." He lifted his head. "Gentlemen, I hope you've enjoyed your tour of my little slice of paradise, because it ends here."

He activated something on the panel. An alert klaxon swelled, each shriek a painful volume that made Wesker want to flinch. Angelus had just started some kind of automated program. Beneath the floor, machinery ground and whirred, and a square of the floor reeled open. Some kind of transport system for specimens, Wesker guessed. He and Leon stepped back from the new opening, their hands on their weapons. A large steel box emerged from the hole, coming to a stop with a pneumatic hiss. The doors slid slowly open.

It was empty.

"What? Where is she?" Angelus all but plastered himself to the glass, eyes wild. " _Where is she_?"

Wesker relaxed.

"Trouble keeping track of your pets?" he asked.

Angelus didn't appear to hear him. The man bolted from the room as if his feet were on fire, an agonized bellow his only parting word.

"That was weird. And embarrassing," Leon said, still rubbing at the bites on his neck.

Wesker smirked. "They look good on you," he offered, and left the room with Leon still sputtering behind him.

There was no sign of Angelus outside. Wherever the man had gotten off to, he had gone fast, and Wesker did not feel like giving chase. He had other objectives to take care of first, namely, disabling those guns.

They resumed their search. Not ten minutes later, Leon found their staircase. It only went up, and was just barely big enough for the two of them to climb it shoulder to shoulder. The higher they climbed, the more the tower began to look like a castle again, steel and concrete giving way to wood and stone. The stairs wound in a tight spiral, up and up, the dismal, mossy stone broken up only by windows. When they passed a door, Leon paused, and poked his head in.

"Looks like Angelus's bedroom," he said.

They looked at each other. Then, on unspoken mutual agreement, abandoned their current goal and entered the room. The grand old master bedroom was lushly furnished with a canopied bed, towering antique furniture, and emerald draping. Several hundred years ago the lord of the castle may have slept here. A personal computer sat on the writing desk, an absurd interjection of modernity against the medieval trappings. A spiral-bound journal sat next to it.

Leon went straight for the journal and snatched it up. At Wesker's incredulous look, he shrugged.

"What can I say. Snooping's a bad habit."

"There are more useful places to snoop," Wesker said, and turned on the computer. "I simply can't understand the fascination with his personal motivations."

"I just want to understand," Leon said.

"Even if it does nothing for you?"

Leon shrugged. Such reckless curiosity. He ought to have been a scientist.

The computer's password was all too easy to crack ("Alexia," of course), and Wesker went straight to skimming files. As a personal computer, it contained mostly correspondence and short notes on experiments in progress. Very little was kept about the 'angels,' themselves. Most of the files centered around a compound called P-Theta, an antigen Angelus had developed as a way to reverse mutation. It worked too well, it seemed, acting as a poison to the infected. It had been foolish to base a cure on the P-Epsilon gas to begin with.

"All these diary entries talk about Alexia like she's his daughter," Leon said.

Wesker paused his reading mid-sentence.

"I see. So that's where the obsession stems from."

"Hang on. Is she his—?"

"Angelus had a daughter. Only one. She worked at 6th lab, if I'm not mistaken, a mediocre scientist who never distinguished herself and held no passion for her work. It must have been a great disappointment for him, after he all but bullied her into the profession. I suppose he decided to replace her with a daughter who could meet his expectations."

Leon snorted.

"I wonder how she feels about that."

"I doubt she feels much of anything. She died in a laboratory accident a year ago. Right around the same time Angelus began losing cohesion, I might add."

"Geeze." Leon carded a hand through his hair. "I guess grief can do funny things to people." He cast a side-long glance at Wesker. "You know an awful lot about them."

"One can never have too much information about one's co-workers. You never know when it may come in handy."

"And you scoff at me for snooping."

"Angelus is about to die. That's why I see no point in dredging through his affairs."

Leon's eyes narrowed, but he returned his attention to the journal without further comment. Wesker went back to reading, until a sharp inhalation beside him made him turn again. Leon angled the journal towards him and pointed to a picture taped to one page. In it, a woman in graduation robes stared belligerently into the camera, as if daring its photographer to try and take her diploma. A slightly younger Angelus beamed beside her.

"That thing that attacked us, the MJ-03," Leon said. "Was that his daughter?"

Wesker blinked slowly. Those cherubic features were familiar, now that he looked closely at them.

"Margaret Joan Fitzpatrick. It would fit." The dates lined up, and it would neatly explain Angelus's fervor into trying to reverse acute T-Veronica mutation. "Submitting deceased staff as test subjects is not unheard of within the company."

"All that other junk you memorized, and you never bothered to learn what her name used to be."

"So sentimental. What good would it do? Dead is dead, no matter what happens to the corpse afterwards. Surely you know that bioweapons aren't people anymore?"

"It mattered to Angelus." Leon slammed the journal down on the desk. "He drove himself mad trying to undo what your company did to his child. And now that he's lost hope, he's going to go kill a whole lot more people."

"Before you feel too sorry for him, do remember that this man has been performing human experiments since he was out of grad school."

"I don't..." Leon choked down the obvious lie before he could finish it. "It's goddamn Umbrella, and every company like them. If they never existed, these people wouldn't have ended up like this."

"Companies are made of people," Wesker reminded him. "The corporation did not spring from Spencer's head fully formed, no matter how much he likes to pretend it did. Any sins it committed may still be laid at the feet of human beings." He looked up into Leon's eyes. "Do you still believe they only need 'help'?"

"More than ever," Leon replied.

Wesker shut the computer down and stood up.

"I think I've finished here, if you're done."

"Yeah. I'm done."

They climbed the rest of the way in heavy silence. Leon seemed to perk up when they emerged into the open air of the battlement, breathing the muggy swamp air in deeply. It did smell better than the putrid odors of antiseptic, death, and stasis fluid that flooded the labs. Automated turrets and other anti-aircraft weaponry squatted on the crenels at intervals, their barrels trawling the night sky.

"So if we can figure out how to turn these off—" Leon began.

Wesker seized the nearest turret, ripped it up from its bolts, and threw it over the side.

"Or we could do that," Leon amended, looking suitably awed. Wesker smirked for him. The man recovered his spirits quickly, a good trait to have when one had the baffling compulsion to seek out information that would only depress him.

"If we leave them here, they could be reactivated. Better to be thorough, don't you agree?"

"I guess."

Leon hung back while Wesker worked, his mouth moving subtly. Calling in reinforcements, no doubt. Wesker let him. The agent would need evac, and if they sent anything more than that, H.C.F. was more than capable of taking them out. Wesker made his own call while Leon was busy, reporting his progress. When the last turret had plummeted down into the swamp below, Wesker met Leon at the top of the stairs. They eyed each other, wary and knowing.

"Shall we?" Wesker asked.

"After you."

The tenuous truce would not last much longer. Nothing in the labs so far required two people, and they were running out of joint objectives. He felt the break coming, like the cut end of an engine belt rapidly approaching its wheels. If Leon felt the tension, he did not bow to it, but continued to make flippant remarks all the way back down to the labs.

Just past the testing chamber where Angelus had run off, they at last came across one of Wesker's goals: the main computer, and all the stolen data it held. A metal and circuit 'Rapunzel,' as Leon would say.

Anticipating the change in the air, he turned to his companion. Leon had dropped back, canted himself to the side so his front was facing Wesker, his eyes intent.

"Allow me to guess your mission parameters," Wesker said. "'Destroy all specimens and eliminate research data which could pose a threat to the United States.' Am I wrong?"

Leon's jaw clenched.

"Not destroy. Retrieve."

Wesker's lips twisted into a smile.

"You'd think they would have learned."

"Same for you," Leon said. He pulled out the gun which Wesker knew to be nearly empty, slid out the cartridge and frowned at it. "Those are the orders." He slammed the clip back into the gun. "Those are always the orders. It's too bad the whole lab was in such chaos I had no choice but to destroy everything in order to survive."

"So that's it." He wondered how many times the U.S. Government had sent Leon out on those same orders, only for their agent to return empty-handed yet victorious. He couldn't imagine they would tolerate many. As he studied Leon, he saw opportunity in the other man's grim expression. "And you're certain you wish to stay with this master?"

Leon met his eyes squarely, not defiant this time, not angry, simply calm and unwavering as a boulder standing in the center of a stream.

"Yeah. I am."

Hesitation. A step forward, but not a step far enough.

Leon moved before Wesker did, not that it did him any good. Just as a 10 minute head start for a cyclist won't help them against a race car, so Leon lost the moment Wesker chose to move. He seized Leon by the neck and slammed the man into the nearest wall. Hot pain sliced through his chest somewhere between grabbing Leon and lifting him. Nothing like heartbreak—Leon had sunk his combat knife into Wesker's chest, nearly hitting his heart. If he had hit the heart, Wesker would have staggered enough for the man to escape. Too bad for him he missed by an inch. Wesker grabbed Leon's hand, tore it from the knife's handle, and stuck it to the wall next to his head.

Leon gagged, kicking Wesker's solid form with all the limited strength he could muster. Wesker held on, unfazed and unsmiling. Usually, Wesker strangled his enemies because he found joy in watching them suffer. In this case, the motivation was a more unseemly one: hesitation. He wavered, a candle flame in a stiff breeze, unable to escape its wick but trying. He kept thinking of the crushing spike trap, of Leon's hands on him, patient and gentle as they freed him. No one else would have done the same. No one else would have been so soft and stupid.

Leon was an enemy, an irritant, a liability. He needed to be removed before he caused any more problems.

Didn't he?

Not content to die quietly, Leon grabbed Wesker's burned shoulder with his free hand, dug blunt fingernails into the sensitive skin, and tore it up as sharply as he could. Wesker flinched at the needles of pain through the tender flesh, held firm for a moment against every instinct to wrench backward, and then...let go.

With a gasp the other man fell to his feet, his bruised throat choking on the air he tried to drag in. Leon staggered backwards as he coughed, checked his hip against a console behind him. Wesker did not attack him again. He had made his decision. An enemy with such a tantalizing mixture of compassion, weakness, and competence was too potentially useful to throw away. Ada must have known that all along.

"I'm sure you understand that I can't allow you to fulfill either mission," he said, calm and genial as if he had not just tried to kill this man.

He picked Leon up, by the back of his shirt this time, and carried him out of the lab like a misbehaving puppy. Then he tossed him to the floor outside.

At the press of a button, the lab door shuttered between them, cutting off his view of Leon's adorably shocked face. A few seconds later, he heard a pound on it.

"Is this how you treat all your one-night stands?" Leon bellowed through the door, voice raspy.

"Only the ones I like!" Wesker replied.

Let Leon run about the lab, if he liked. Wesker had no doubt the man would survive. If he was wise, he would go straight back up to the battlements and wait for his ride out of here. Of course, Leon had spent most of this adventure proving that he was very much a fool, yet what could one man with a knife do to stop Wesker OR Angelus at this point? If he planned to stab every specimen to death, well, Wesker wished him luck.

The main computer had not been damaged in all the ruckus of the outbreak, and Wesker did not even have to hack it. He inserted a flash disk into the slot and started the data transfer. It would take about 15 minutes. This computer was not as fast as Sergei's beloved Red Queen. He spent his time wandering the lab, examining the surviving equipment. There was little blood here, and most of the specimens were floating peacefully in their tanks. A printout on the table detailed Angelus's plans to airdrop his "Angels" into nearby major cities. They were poorly thought out and overly complicated, just as the man's projects always had been.

The data transfer was at 75% when the power cut out.

* * *

Leon smirked to himself as he left the power room. Earlier in their explorations he'd noticed this room and mapped away its location for later, just as Wesker suggested, always keeping his orientation towards it in mind as they wound their way through the labs. If he was lucky, the sudden shut down had corrupted something on the computers. The one drawback, he mused as he shut the door, was that he now had to navigate the lab by flashlight.

His next goal was back in that first lab, in a storage rack set beside the door. He selected one bulky gas canister from among the lot, staggering a little under its weight. Now he needed the main for the altered sprinkler system, and that was one thing he hadn't seen yet. He carried the canister all the way back to the power room and left it on the floor while he searched.

It still burned to breathe. He imagined he could feel the fingerprints lining his throat, side by side with the bite marks. Always went straight for the throat, that Wesker. Leon was still dazed at being let go. Chris had told him about Rockfort, and how Wesker would have choked the life from him if he hadn't been distracted by Alexia. Well, Leon had had no Alexia to interrupt things, but he'd survived anyway. He wouldn't pretend to understand why. Somehow he'd earned himself a get out of murder free card, by helping Wesker, or fooling around with him, or just being too damn charming.

Probably not that last one.

An awful smell overpowered his thoughts. This was an achievement in a lab full of horrible smells, for this one to wrestle its way to the top of the heap and punch him in the nostrils. It was the acrid stench of burnt flesh. The bobbing circle of his flashlight lit over scorch marks across the walls, and ash drifted along the floor.

Around the next corner, a door hung open from a dented frame. Here was that fabled old staircase from the days before elevators. He looked down the wide stone steps and felt a sinking, as if his stomach had just hurtled down them.

Something breathed behind him, rasping and wet, more throttled than his own. The burnt-flesh smell clouded around him, made him gag. He turned.

There she was, the MJ-03, the fire dancer. She stood in a lopsided, back-broken posture, new knobby growths over her neck forcing her head to lean to one side. Her arms had grown back thicker, ropes of flesh webbing the bone-spikes at her shoulders. Her white, dead eye stared through him.

Leon looked at her, and felt very old and tired.

"Hi Margaret," he said quietly. "Let's go find your father."

Maybe, just maybe, if he confronted Angelus with the one thing he had been trying so hard to save, he could get through to him.

* * *

Several rooms away, Wesker had just found and pulled his gun on the man of the house. Angelus stood with his sleeve rolled up, contemplating a syringe injector.

"Ah. So we've reached this point, have we?" Wesker asked snidely. "For all that you insult William Birkin, you seem determined to copy him."

"That fool got himself killed. I am choosing to go out this way." Angelus didn't even look at him.

"And this makes you better?"

"There's no point!" Angelus burst out, flailing his arms like an angry child. "Nothing in this world has a point! You slave your entire life away, and then you die, and no one remembers you!" His voice cracked on that word, 'remembers.' He leveled one accusing finger at Wesker, his wrinkled hand trembling. "Even YOU. When you die, no one will remember you. All of us old bastards will be wiped from memory, like dust from a history book. Unless," his eyes turned back to the syringe, "You manage to leave behind a legacy."

Wesker squeezed the trigger, shattering the quiet with the boom of a gunshot. He hit Angelus in the shoulder, and the man went down, the syringe injector flying from his hand to skitter across the floor.

"None of that, if you don't mind. I've dealt with enough wet garbage today."

Angelus started laughing. The blood leaking down his front sizzled, eating a blackened trail down white cotton. All at once, it caught fire, and Angelus kept laughing.

"I've already injected it!"

Wesker glanced to the syringe, dismayed to find that it did, indeed, look empty.

"Now, we will be the same," Angelus said, his voice high and hysteric, mixed between cackling and sobbing.

Green burst from Angelus's wound like lit mercuric thiocyanate, crawling over his torso and winding around his neck. His engorged heart cracked open his rib cage, beating red and orange and angry against his swelling chest. Wesker backed up towards the door, his eyes and gun fixed on the grisly transformation even as he plotted the quickest escape route.

The opposite door burst open, and Leon came charging through. He screeched to a halt upon noticing the burning, laughing figure rapidly mutating on the floor, his face sad but unsurprised.

"Right over here," he called over his shoulder, catching the door before it could close and keeping it open.

The action baffled Wesker. Surely Leon's reinforcements could not have arrived already?

Leon dove to the left, out of the path of the door, just as a long flaming arm crashed through it. A high, piercing scream overpowered Angelus's cackling. MJ-03 staggered into the room in all her glory, a little more bent and twisted after her bad encounter with the chandelier.

"This is one family reunion I'm not sticking around for," Leon said, and ran past him. "Hey, Wesker! You might want to get off this floor within the next ten minutes!"

"What?"

With that cryptic warning, Leon was out the door. The two Veronica specimens were both up and shrieking at each other now, the territorial instincts of their ravaged brains taking hold. Neither showed any sign of recognizing the other. Leon seemed to have had the right idea. Wesker ran, leaving behind the duet of screams, and laughter, and the crackling of fire.

It had been a mistake to leave Leon running free, as the power outage had made clear, and Wesker intended to rectify that mistake. With his superior speed, he caught up in seconds, just in time to see Leon duck into a lab. When he entered, the agent had vanished. If he held still, Wesker could hear breathing, and the softest shuffling of fabric.

"There's no point in hiding," Wesker called, his voice echoing against the walls. "Why don't you stop cringing behind a tank and come explain to me what you were yelling about?"

Leon did not take the bait. Sighing, Wesker patrolled the room, searching behind every waist-high barrier for the other man. Every so often he caught the squeak of a boot over tile, or a soft footfall, and he followed the noises in loop-de-loops around the wrecked lab equipment. The exercise should have been asinine, yet he couldn't deny a certain thrill in hunting, knowing his enemy could do little against him but run.

As he passed one of the groups of stasis tanks, he heard a sudden creaking of metal beside him. He had a glimpse of silver rapidly approaching his face, and then the falling tank slammed him down into the ground, knocking the breath from him and pinning his hips. He hit so hard his sunglasses flew off his face, the plastic clattering across the floor away from him. As he lay dazed, recollecting his wits, footsteps pounded in front of him. On reflex he lashed out, snagged an ankle and tugged, sending Leon to his own painful rendezvous with the floor.

"Ah—There you are," Wesker grit out. He held fast to Leon with one hand while the other groped behind him for the machinery piled over his lower half. "I spared you, and this is the thanks you give to me? You should know better than to become too inconven—"

Leon lunged forward and kissed him full on the mouth, cutting off his snide words. He was so surprised he lost his grip. Then Leon tore away from him, and something crunched loudly under the agent's boot as he twisted upright and sprinted away. By the time Wesker's brain rebooted, Leon was up and halfway to the door.

Wesker freed himself and sprang up to give chase, but it was too late. The laboratory door slammed shut and locked, setting several inches of reinforced steel between himself and his quarry. The door did not give, no matter how hard he rammed his fist into it.

"I can't believe you've resorted to stealing tricks from cartoon rabbits!"

"Yeah, I'm a stinker," Leon replied. "Four minutes left! The stairs are back the way I came from!"

"Four minutes until WHAT?"

No answer.

It couldn't be the self-destruct, if Angelus even had such a thing. There were no warning sirens, no computerized voice counting down to destruction, no sign that anything at all was about to happen. Could it be a bluff, to get him out of the way? Or had Leon been hiding some explosive charges this whole time, and set them up to go off on a timer?

He lowered his hand from the door. Which to trust: Leon's compassion, or his wiliness?

The last direction he wanted to go was back towards what was left of Angelus and his charming daughter. And maybe that was Leon's game, to lead him towards the two most violent and dangerous B.O.W.s in the place. Three minutes left.

He went to collect his sunglasses from the floor, only to find them hopelessly broken. Leon must have stepped on them. His eye twitched as he regarded the sad pile of shattered lenses. Leon would pay for that, but later.

For now, Wesker compromised, and ran towards the elevator. If there was an explosion, the elevator ought to be enough to shield him from the bulk of it, and he could survive the car crashing. He could survive a lot of things; he simply didn't want to get set on fire again today.

The elevator was in sight when his ears caught a hissing from the ceiling above. Green mist was leaking from the fire sprinklers. Wesker coughed, staggered. His eyes stung as if someone had flecked them with acid. This—this was just like the P-epsilon gas back in Raccoon. No.

The P-Theta.

 _Goddamnit Leon._

This would worse than kill the remaining specimens, it would melt them, eradicate the virus in their systems. Wesker cursed a blue streak as he staggered into the elevator and hit the button to close the doors. Even his system would have shut down if he inhaled too large a concentration of that. Maybe it wouldn't kill him, but it might send him into a coma until his virus adapted to it. To submit to such weakness minutes before his employers were due to arrive would be the end for him. They'd cart him off to a lab and never let him wake up again.

The elevator sank down, away from the poisonous antigen, down to the bottom of the keep. Apparently he had hit the button for the first floor. Good enough as any, he was happy to put as much distance between himself and that gas as possible.

The doors opened with a happy ding. Outside, a hulking green form with an enormous axe turned to him, auburn hair swinging out of the path of a bright red eye. Wesker managed a tired smile.

"Ah, there you are Steven."

* * *

Leon waved to the chopper from atop the battlements. He felt pretty accomplished, all things considered. He'd opened every specimen tank to make sure everything got exposed to the gas, and had smashed up the main computer for good measure. Soon Wesker's men would get here to scavenge what they could. Let them. And if the U.S. government wanted to duke it out with them, they could go right ahead. Leon wasn't about to stick around for it.

He braced himself as the chopper neared, waiting for some hidden jerk with a rocket launcher to shoot it down. No such disaster happened. The chopper lowered a ladder for him, and he climbed up.

"Any other survivors?" the pilot yelled over the noise of the blades.

Leon's mood darkened.

"No," he said. There never were.

* * *

End Note: Wesker, you done got Leon'd. Ada could have warned you about that.

Thank you everyone for your comments and support so far! Just got the epilogue to go now. I'll probably post it by the end of the week, since it's short.


	7. Epilogue

**Chapter 7: Epilogue**

The flight home had been long, the debriefing harrowing, and the following medical examination awkward beyond belief, but after enduring all that usual post-mission rigmarole , Leon had finally returned to his apartment complex. It was roughly three in the morning, the flickering streetlight casting soft orange shadows over the nearly full parking lot, and even the rowdiest of his neighbors had long since fallen asleep. Yet, there was one light on in the row of dark windows above him. His own light.

Someone was inside his apartment.

Leon watched it through his windshield, fingers tapping an aimless pattern on the steering wheel as he tried to decide whether he should be worried or not. There might be a vengeful, petty Wesker up there, lying in wait to threaten—or worse, flirt with him. If he was honest with himself, the prospect didn't scare him as much as it should have. Of course, it could also have been Claire, or Jill, or Chris, each or all of them supernaturally sensing that he had fraternized with the enemy and needed to have his ears lectured off.

If he wanted to play safe, he ought to call for some kind of backup. Leon had never been a big fan of playing things safe. Instead, he got out, locked his car, and headed upstairs as calmly as you please.

His door was locked. He turned the key in it as quietly as possible, and held the handle down as he eased the door open to keep the mechanism from clicking. The light came from the kitchen, where a woman in red sat at his table. She sat with her crossed arms braced on the tabletop, her usual coy smirk replaced by the slightest of frowns. Leon felt lighter just at the sight of her, as if the past ten hours of irritation had never happened.

The moment she saw him her shoulders eased. She uncoiled from her tense posture, draping herself over the folding chair as if it were a settee.

"Hello, handsome."

"Ada. This is a surprise."

They ran into each other on the job now and then, but she'd never broken into his apartment before. Her eyes roved over him, as if she were counting every part to make sure everything was there.

"I wouldn't want to become too predictable," she said. "I heard you had quite an adventure."

"The usual." Leon shrugged a shoulder. At a loss, he offered, "Coffee?" and crossed to the machine to get it started.

"At three in the morning?"

"Oh." He put the pot back down, feeling a little foolish. Damn did he need to collapse into bed and sleep. "Jet lag, you know. Can't tell if I'm coming or going. So, what are you doing here?"

"An old friend sent me a very cute photo." She reached into her bra and pulled out her phone, waggled it once before unlocking it and setting it on the table.

Leon bent close to look. It was a very unflattering shot of himself emulating a tomato, one hand pressed to his neck and half-covering a bite mark, with a white wall behind him. She had made it her cell background.

He could feel heat creeping up his cheeks and knew he'd soon match the photo. When had Wesker even taken that picture?

"Ah." He dared a glance at her face. She looked like she wanted to laugh, but was afraid of spoiling her image. Oh, hell, he might as well own it. "Are you here to tell me I'm insane, too?"

"It was a good move. Now he won't be so interested in having you killed."

"I wouldn't be so sure about that," Leon muttered, remembering the look on Wesker's face the moment before the door slammed between them.

"Trust me. I've known him for longer," Ada said. "I just wanted to drop by and check on you. He can be a little..." Now the coy smirk made its appearance. "Rough, without realizing it."

"Yeah," Leon agreed. "Well? Do I pass inspection?" He held his arms out wide.

"Mmm." She looked over him again, her gaze lingering this time. "I'll say you do. Well, I'm a busy girl. I should be going."

He thought of asking her to stay, yet his bones ached in protest and the pillow was calling to him. Some other time perhaps, when he wasn't about to pass out. So, he merely watched as she stood up and slinked over to his window.

"Oh, and..." she twisted to face him, one foot planted on his windowsill and hookshot in hand. "Be careful. He bites."

"Yeah. I noticed." His face twisted up, unable to hold back the sour expression. Boy, that had been fun to explain to the medical examiner. He had a scarf on now to hide the marks.

Ada laughed, and dove from the window.

End

Author's Note: Thank you everyone for sticking with this ride to the end!

And yes, if you were wondering, Old Scrape-y was Steve the whole time.


End file.
